The Beatles

I'll be honest - I've never cared much for The Beatles.

Now that everyone has sufficiently recovered, let me add "till now" to the last statement. I see you've gone from clasping your chest to the smug, all-knowing smile. Very well, let's move on then.

Last week, I was engaging in my favourite pastime during lunch (if you call nibbling on an apple lunch) - Wiki-ing. That is looking some famous book, movie, rock group or music album on Wikipedia. There is no dearth of information there! One page leads to another, which leads to a third and so on till the lunch hour is up and you're back to the drudgery of aircrafts.

I was reading up on the Beatles and their influences and was particularly drawn to Lennon and read in detail about him and Ono and we'll save the bitching for the end. For right now, I read that Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland was a huge, huge, huge inspiration for the Beatles. Not that it wasn't obvious from "The Walrus and The Carpenter" but this was insight. And the back of my head was screaming Ashoka, Kalinga, resolve a lot.

I read up on Lewis Carroll and Sgt Pepper's Band next. Sgt Pepper's fascinated me but due to my limited knowledge of music, Lewis Carroll and his works fascinated me more. Charles Lutwidge Dodson, an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican and photographer whose greatest works include only Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, was as most geniuses are, a weirdo.

I am still unclear on what is acceptable and what is not and how do we define the ranges of acceptability and normality but temporarily using the predefined norms, Lewis Carroll was a weirdo. However, I guess it takes an aberration to produce genius and with this new found light, I'm driven to read Lewis Carroll again. Maybe even some of the criticism and autobiographies. Like I intend to do for Narayan.

Reading the littlest bit of Narayan's life and his introduction to "My Grandmother's Tale" made me appreciate Nagaraj and Krishna a whole lot more. Narayan's Wiki page informs me that Shashi Tharoor is one of his strongest critics. Shashi Tharoor, also happens to be my favourite columnist in the Sunday Times (face it Bagchi, Shobha and Jug - you will never match up!) and the whole world of Malgudi and History or whatever I remember of it from 10th standard makes me want to read Tharoor's criticism of him.

In a similar vein, I urge anyone who has had the patience to read this post till here to revisit all their childhood classics armed with the information from the author's Wiki page or perhaps the book's Wiki page or its homepage or the poetry lovers website. Whatever it is, re-read (like Gulshan Kumar is re-presenting - Aaargh!) , you never know what you might discover. You read it the first time with the giddy pleasure of a growing reader, now read with the humbling knowledge of circumstance, history and message. And the haughtiness that comes with possessing such knowledge.

To the Beatles, thank you for re-introducing Lewis Carroll and Alice. I do intend to hear you out as well. But, first the inspiration before the inspired.