Apr 27 2022 to Apr 27 2022 6 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

The Beatles and India is a 2021 documentary film directed by Indian author and political journalist Ajoy Bose. It covers the Beatles‘ immersion in Indian culture and philosophy during the 1960s and the band’s influence on India.

The film was inspired by Ajoy Bose’s book Across the Universe: The Beatles in India, published in 2018, fifty years after the Beatles‘ highly publicised stay in Rishikesh, India. It was Bose’s directorial debut. Cultural researcher Peter Compton co-directed and Reynold D’Silva, head of Silva Screen Music Group, produced the film.

The Beatles and India explores the band’s three-year immersion in Indian culture. Bose said he was keen to show that “the India part of the Beatles saga” was more substantial than merely the group’s sojourn in Rishikesh and their studying Transcendental Meditation (TM) there under teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Beatles and India includes input and recollections from 1960s Indian pop musicians. It also explores news reports from 1968 in which communist and socialist Indian politicians claimed that the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh was a camp run by the CIA. The film reveals that the KGB dispatched its agent Yuri Bezmenov to investigate the ashram. Footage from the late 1980s shows Bezmenov talking with satisfaction about how he believed TM students such as actress Mia Farrow unwittingly contributed to the destabilising of American society by returning home and disseminating a message of “sit down, look at your navel and do nothing”.