This isn’t about Bombay jazz but I decided to make an exception since it’s broadly about Bombay musical culture. Here’s the text of remarks I made at the launch of Ajay Bose’s book Across the Universe at the Opera House in Bombay in March 2018.

In my neighbourhood of Bandra, they still tell the story of a young man who was sitting on a wall in the 1960s, playing My Sweet Lord, when a scraggly hippy with a guitar on his back stopped to listen. As the Bandra boy finished the tune, the hippy is supposed to have exclaimed: “You play that song even better than I do. My name is George Harrison.” And as a sign of his approval, Harrison is said to have taken the guitar off his back and given it to the chap as a gift .

As I was reading Ajoy Bose’s fascinating book about the Beatles in India, I decided I should play my parochial part by doing a little research on the Beatles in Bandra. 

Of course, many stories about the Beatles in Bombay are already pretty well known. A few years ago, I participated in BBC radio programme by the writer Safraz Mansoor called Bombay’s Beatle. The show revolved around the time in 1968 when George Harrison came to the city to record the soundtrack to a film called Wonderwall, which featured Indian classical musicians like tabla player Mahapurush Misra, surhbahar player Chandra Shekhar and santoor maestro Shivkumar Sharma.

We walked down Pherozeshah Mehta Road to peer at the fading sign of the HMV studio where the sessions had taken place and Sarfraz interviewed some of these musicians about their time in the studio with Harrison.

Years ago, when I bought that enormous book of pictures and photographs and other memorabilia called The Beatles Anthology, I had been delighted to find, on page 280, the image of memo that had been sent to Neil Aspinall, the band’s manager, from HMV’s India office, about the trip Harrison was planning to make to Bombay in January, 1968.  It refers to one of Ravi Shankar’s senior students, Shambudas.