My Music, My Life

Two Indian Artists made me what I am. These were my older brother. Uday, one of the greatest proponents of all things Indian and especially of our classical dance: and Allauddin Khan, called Baba, the master musician, who became my guru. When I was ten, in 1930, I joined a troupe of dancers and musicians that Uday had just formed. I was to dance in Paris and then around the world--including the United States--for the next eight years; but my progression to the sitar did not begin in earnest until I was 15, when Baba joined the troupe.

Our father had just died and Uday and I were back in India at that time. Baba himself decided at the last moment not to take his son. Ali Akbar, with him on the next tour. The day came that we were due to sail. My mother was going to remain in India and she and I both had the premonition that we might not see each other again. While we stood on the pier in Bombay, she took my hand, put it in Baba's and told him, "I'm not going with you, and I don't know if I'll ever see my child again. So please take him and consider him as your own son." We all had tears in our eyes as we said goodbye. As it happened, it was the last time I saw my mother.

Baba stayed with our troupe for nearly a year. During all those months, I was his guide, helper and special companion. I suppose he missed Ali Akbar very much, and so he gave me all the love and affection that would have gone to his son. While we were traveling, especially, I used to take care of Baba, finding, the right restaurants and the proper kind of food for him. One day, I remember, I wanted to do something special to please him and, recalling that he occasionally enjoyed smoking. I went out and bought him a pipe, a pouch for tobacco and a lighter. When I presented the gifts to him, instead of being pleased, he flared up in one of his unreasonable, furious angers. "I'm not one of those gurus you can buy," he stormed at me.

But most of the time, he was very gentle with me, He knew how interested I was in seriously learning instrumental music, and I got him to begin teaching me the basics of sitar and voice. Some-times, he would become upset and grow angry when I was learning, because, although I was a good student, he felt that dance was uppermost in my thoughts. It angered and hurt him that I should be "wasting my musical talent" and living in glitter and luxury. Baba insisted that this was no way to learn music from him, not in these surroundings, and he swore I would never go through the discipline required to master the technique of the sitar. He made some very cruel remarks about my constant girl chasing, my dandy's tastes in clothing and all my other interests outside music--painting, writing and reading. He often said that if you do one thing properly and very well, all other things will come easily later; but if you start with too much, you will end up with nothing.

In the summer of 1936, we spent a few months at Dartington Hall in DeVonshire. England. a beautiful, open place, where Uday planned to work on a few new ballets. I had a great deal of time to practice on the sitar and have lessons with Baba. This was the first time I played scales and exercises and not just whatever pleasing melodies came into my head. All summer I worked on the exercises and fixed compositions and learned many songs. Inside me, I sensed something new and very exciting; I felt I was coming close to real music and that this music was what I was meant to devote my life to. But then in the fall, Baba had to leave us a bit earlier than expected and go back to India.

It was a year and a half before I saw him again. Throughout that time, I was filled with worries and questions and indecision, and there was really no one I could talk to about it. Uday was quite convinced that I should keep up dancing as my primary interest. but he thought a few months with Baba wouldn't do me any harm. At that time, Uday was planning to disband the troupe and establish a center for the performing arts in India. He thought I could get a solid musical background with Baba, then come back and assist him at the center.

We finished our last tour and the troupe returned to India in May of 1938. I went immediately to a house that had been built for my mother just before her death. There I thought of a religious event I had neglected for many years and decided that was the time to go through it. This is the sacred-thread ceremony that initiates a young Brahman boy into the religion. Usually, it is performed between the ages of 7 and 12. Although I had turned 18, I wanted to have the ceremony performed. in the month of June, I had my head shaved and prepared for the initiation into Brahmanism. Each initiate must spend a few months living like a monk, eating special food and abstaining from all material things. I spent nearly two months living this way, free of worldly matters, before I returned to my family.

When my religious duties were over, I prepared to leave for an indefinite stay with Baba in the little village of Maihar, about a day's journey away. My brother Rajendra accompanied me to the village on a day in July. As we traveled, I was all in a turmoil inside. I felt as though I were committing suicide. I knew that I would be reborn, but had no way of knowing how the new life would be.

When I arrived. Baba was shocked to see me so transformed. My head was still shaved and I wore simple clothes of very coarse material. I had brought one tin suitcase with a few belongings and two blankets with a pillow rolled up in side them. I had changed myself to the opposite extreme from the boy Baba had known in Europe, partly because I sincerely felt that I had to give up a great deal if I wanted to devote myself to music and partly because I felt this new self would please Baba. In a way, there was some play acting on my part, leaving behind my dandy's habits and living as I thought I should. But I could see right away that Baba was pleased with me.

I stayed in a little house next to Baba's. In the beginning, it was very difficult for me. Alone at night in my house, I was frightened when I heard the howling of the jackals and wolves nearby and the deep croaking of the frogs and all the racket of the cricket of the. After eight years of luxurious living in Europe, it took me months to accustom myself to sleeping on a cot made of four pieces of bamboo tied together with coconut rope. Every morning, I remember, a maidservant used to come in very early to tidy up. put the water on for tea and prepare a little breakfast. After I'd been in Maihar for some time, another student came and stayed with me. but Baba beat him on the second or third day and he ran away. At least 30 boys came to share the little house with me. but none of them ever stayed longer than a week or ten days, because they could not bear Baba's temper and strict discipline.

I was quite lucky to have already spent a year with Baba when he was traveling with Uday's troupe. In that time, I had gotten to know him quite well--all his little weaknesses and the peculiarities of his nature. Normally. he was the most humble and gentle person imaginable, filled with the spirit we call Vinaya. But often. when he started teaching, he became violent and irascible and would not tolerate one little slip from the student. He even used to beat the maharaja who employed him in his service!

But Baba has never once struck me or even raised his voice to me. Well. just one time: When I had first gone to him and he was teaching me an exercise, I was not able to play it correctly. "Ha!" he exclaimed. "You have no strength in those wrists. Da, da, da," he cried, as he smacked my hands. I was trying my best and felt terrible that he should be angry with me. From my childhood. no one had ever spoken angrily to me. although I was quite spoiled and sometimes behaved badly. So when Baba raised his voice to me. I began to get angry myself, rather than frightened. "Go," he taunted me,"go. go and buy some bangles to wear on your wrists. You are like a weak little girl! You have no strength. You can't even do this exercise!" That was enough for me. I got up. went next door. packed my bedding and belongings, marched off to the railroad station and bought a ticket home. I had just missed a train and had to wait awhile for the next one.

In the meantime, Ali Akbar came running up and, seeing my bags, asked what had happened. "I won't stay." I told him. "He scolded me today."

Ali Akbar looked at me incredulously and asked if I were mad. "You are the only person he has never laid a hand on. We're all amazed by it. Why. do you know what he's done to me? He's tied me to a tree every day for a week and beaten me and even refused me food. And you run away because he gives you a little scolding." Ali Akbar persuaded me to go back to the house with him and I temporarily set my bags down again in my room.

By then. he had told his mother what had happened and she had told Baba. Ali Akbar came to tell me they wanted me to have lunch with them. and when I went into the house. Ali Akbar's mother said to me. "Come. You are leaving soon, but just come in and sit with Baba for a few minutes." I went over to him and saw that he was cutting out a photograph of me and putting it into a (continued on page 142) My music, my life (continued from page 112) frame. Neither of us said a word, but I saw that he was moved.

After a little while. I finally said, "I am going today."

Slowly, he looked over at me and asked. "Is that all? I mean. I just told you to wear bangle bracelets and it has hurt you so much that you are going to leave?" I had tears in my eyes. I had never seen him like this. He stood up and came over to me and said, "You remember at the pier in Bombay how your mother put your hand in mine and asked me to look after you as my own son? Since then, I have accepted you as my son, and this is how you want to break it?"

Naturally, I didn't leave Baba after this scene. And after that, whenever he felt angry because of something I had done, he would get up and go beat someone else.

It took a few months, but I got used to the quiet, disciplined life with Baba. Usually, I would wake up about four o'clock in the morning and have a quick wash, not the regular bath, and fix a cup of tea. I took my sitar and practiced the basic scales as I drank my tea until six o'clock or so. Then I had my bath, did the morning worship that we are taught from our childhood and ate two boiled eggs and a piece of Indian bread. After the little meal. I practiced the exercises or whatever I had learned the previous day so I could play it well when I went to Baba later on. Everything had to be memorized, of course, because we don't write anything down--not the notes or any of the formal instruction, except for some small reminders for ourselves about the music. It must all be absorbed right away by the hands and the mind. A little after seven, I took my sitar, trembling and apprehensive, and crossed the garden to Baba's house, where we would work for two or three hours. Sometimes he gave me a very difficult thing to learn. Then the lesson would take only half an hour and I would go sit for another hour or two, practicing and trying to learn it. Baba realized immediately that, mentally, I was quite advanced in the music. But my hands were far behind, because I had spent so little time learning the basics. I used to hate the scales and exercises; it was a spiritual torture to me, because my hands could never catch up with the idea of the music inside my head. I went through months of depression, when I felt I was getting nowhere; but when my technique improved. I learned extremely quickly. Then Baba would be inspired and a half-hour lesson often lasted three or four hours. Although Baba knew all the techniques of playing sitar, he did not play the instrument himself. He therefore taught me mostly by singing what he wanted me to play and learn. This is often done with our music, because by imitating the voice, one can get a deep insight into the raga and a better understanding. Often, too, Baba sat with his sarod and played what he wanted to teach me; but this was difficult, because the sitar and sarod are turned to different keys. Eventually, I devised a way of adjusting my tuning so that the two instruments could work together.

In the beginning, although I had great respect for Baba. I didn't completely understand what he wanted from his disciples. He is a teacher in the old style, demanding total humility and surrendering to the guru on the part of the student--a complete shedding of the ego. The disciple is only the receiver and what he is being taught is all he should consider; he must make no judgments of the guru and no criticisms. Sadly, this feeling of Vinaya is lacking today in many young people, in the East and West alike. The Western student, especially, seems to have an excessively causal attitude toward his teachers and toward the process of learning. The teacher-student association is no longer patterned after the old father-son relationship. The two now are encouraged by prevailing attitudes to act as friends and to consider each other on an equal level. This system, of course, has its benefits, but it is far from ideal for studying Indian music and for understanding our traditions. The Indian teacher finds this casualness disturbing, even in so small a thing as the position the student takes when he sits. Often the student will try to sit on the floor like an Indian; but since he is not accustomed to this (poor thing!), sooner or later he stretches out his legs and shows the soles of his feet to the guru. To us Indians, the feet are considered the most ignoble part of the body, and this position is one of extreme irreverence.

Among our legends, there is a story that illustrates very well this quality of Vinaya. Long ago, it is said, the great rishi (saint-saga) Narada was convinced that he had gained complete mastery of the art of music--in both theory and performance. The wise Vishnu decided to teach Narada a lesson to shatter his pride. So he took him to the dwelling place of the gods; and as they entered one building, they saw many men and women with broken limbs, all weeping over their condition. Vishnu went up to them and asked what was the matter. They told him they were the spirits of ragas and raginis created by Shiva. They said a certain rishi named Narada, who could neither perform nor understand music properly, had twisted and broken their limbs through his singing. And they said that unless some great and skilled musician could sing them again correctly, they would never regain their unmarried wholeness. When he heard this. Narada was deeply ashamed and, in all humility, knelt before Vishnu and begged forgiveness.

Most often, Baba taught me alone; but later, Ali Akbar and sometimes his sister Annapurna would join me for the sessions. Ali Akbar and I became very close, even though I was two years older than he. When I went to Maihar and saw him after nearly three years (he had been in Bombay with us before we left for Europe in 1935). I was greatly surprised and pleased at the progress he had made in his music. Before, he did not seem to me to have much enthusiasm for playing the sarod, and I knew the almost incredible degree to which Baba carried his strictness with him. Ali Akbar told me he had been compelled to practice for 14 to 16 hours every day. Ali Akbar was born with music in his veins, but it was this constant rigorous discipline and riaz (Urdu for "practice") that Baba set for him that has made Ali Akbar one of the greatest instrumentalists alive.

•••

Early in 1945, I left Baba after seven years and went to Bombay. Although my intense training was finished. I returned to Maihar for two or three months a year until 1949 and, after that, went to see him as often as an increasingly busy schedule permitted. In Bombay, I entered a period of private study, composition and increasing recital work. One of the accomplishments from that period of which I am most proud is my scores for the films that make up Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali film trilogy. I also composed several hundred classical and folk pieces for the All-India Radio during a long stretch as its musical director. All through the period, my urge to spread Indian music to the West was growing, as were growing, as were the audiences during my more-and more frequent Western tours. One of my closest helpers in this mission was the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Yehudi went to India for the first time in 1951. Soon after his arrival, a friend of mine held a musical soiree for him and asked me to play. I had seen Yehudi in Paris in the early Thirties, at his rehearsals, but had never met him.

I had never before seen a Western classical musician respond as emotionally to our music as Yehudi did that night in Delhi. And the response was emotional, not just a matter of interest in the music's technical aspects. His reaction to the music and my own reaction to his personality formed the basis for a beautiful friendship. While he was still in India. I heard him give a concert of (continued on page 236) my music, my life (continued from page 142) Bach and Bartók--a piece Bartók had composed especially for him. And he also had a chance to hear several other Indian musicians, from both north and south, perform. Since that first trip. Yehudi has been so taken with Indian music that he is still writing and speaking of it, studying it and trying to understand it better.

After our first meeting. I performed on the same stage as Yehudi many times, though not with him. There was the UNESCO celebration in 1958 and the Commonwealth Festival in 1966. And then at the Bath Festival in 1966. And then at the Bath Festival in 1966, we played our first duet. The festival had commissioned a young German composer to do a piece based on Raga Tilang for us; but while we were rehearsing it, the music did not seem satisfactory. We kept the beginning of the piece more or less as it was and I rewrote the rest completely, keeping only Raga Tilang as the base. This we did in just three days! And the piece was an immediate success. When we did the recording of it soon afterward. I again rewrote it completely and called it Swara Kakali. I also composed a short solo piece for Yehudi based on the morning raga Gunakali and called it Prabhati, which means "of the morning." Yehudi had never played Indian music before: and in this short time, his efforts to play with as much Indian spirit as he could were really praiseworthy. In the latest duet that I have composed for us, which we played at the United Nations Human Rights Day anniversary on December 10, 1967, he really grasped the spirit of the music, and I am sure the audience was as aware of this as I was.

I find in Yehudi the inherent quality of Vinaya and the desire to search for knowledge; for besides his fascination with our music, he is deeply interested in Indian philosophy and yoga. I think he has done a great deal to awaken in Western classical musicians an intense curiosity about India's classical traditions. He is an ideal example for music students all over the world.

•••

My first trip to the United States since a tour with the dance troupe in the Thirties was arranged by friends in 1956. I was excited, of course, about going to the States on my own. My first concert, at the Young Men's Hebrew Association in New York, was surprisingly successful and got quite good notices from the critics. There were a few other performances in New York during the next couple of months, including one at Town Hall that was, like almost all my other performances, arranged through friends without the help of a proper agent. Some Indian friends then set up a few programs for us in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and so we toured to the West Coast. None of these places was new to me: but still, going on my own after such a long time and performing for such a different kind of audience, I saw things from a new perspective. I noticed quite a change in the country itself--so much more affluence and self-assurance, and the attitude of the young people seemed to have changed so much since the War.

Though I always considered San Francisco and the surrounding country as one of the most beautiful places in the world, there was something about Los Angeles that I felt more in tune with and that appealed to me more. Maybe it was this love for Los Angeles that prompted me to choose this city for a branch of my school of music. In Bombay. I had already established my Kinnara School of Indian Music, and in my dreams I saw a school run on the basis of the old ashrams--a small but complete community somewhere beyond the city, with some very talented disciples, not too many, and a carefully chosen group of gurus to teach the different styles of singing and of instrumental music.

In recent tours to the States, and particularly to the West Coast, I found many young people with a great desire to learn the music of India. And even in India, over the past five years or so. I have seen many young people from the West who have come to study our music. Some of them come to study with the help of fellowships and others have saved up enough money to make the trip. But too often, these eager students settle down in a city, find a teacher, start to assimilate the new atmosphere--and discover their time is up. Most of them return to America none the wiser, musically at least. It was after seeing all these young people that I thought of starting a branch of my Bombay school in Los Angeles. Classes opened at the end of May 1967, in quite modest quarters. It has since grown enough so that we have had to move to a larger building. On the school premises, no smoking is permitted and everyone is supposed to take off his shoes before entering the school. There are no chairs, so students have to sit in the Indian manner, and they must also learn the proper greetings that are exchanged with the teacher.

My purpose in starting the school was to give young men and women a chance to learn the foundations of our music before going to India for further study. Apart from the basic technical training, we also give the students a thorough knowledge of the history and development of our music, along with the legends, mythology, religion and the cultural heritage of the past and its link with the present. Americans, perhaps more than anyone else, I think, are ready for these disciplines, for several reasons. First, after achieving tremendous affluence, they have had more than their fill of material things now. Then, most importantly, there is the problem of the young people and their search to find the way to peace, harmony and love. Theirs seems to be a revolt against the Western ways of life; but I find they are good at adapting to other customs, and the traditions of India seem most attractive to them now, in spite of the strictness and discipline they call for.

What I call the great sitar explosion began in early 1966--at least, that is when I became aware of it, when I went to Britain. The special attraction to sitar suddenly came about when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and some other pop groups used it in recordings of their songs. Until then, I had never heard any records of these groups, but only knew vaguely that they were young popular singers.

Then I met George Harrison and Paul McCartney of the Beatles in June 1966, at a friend's house in London. I found them to be very charming and polite young men--not at all what I had expected. George came and talked to me about sitar. He said that he had been very much impressed with the instrument and its sound and my playing of it since he first heard me. I told him that after hearing so much about his accomplishments. I would like him to show me what he had done with the sitar. With an awkward and childlike expression, he said shyly that it was really not very much. And it was then that I was struck by his deep humility. George explained to me that he had had no real sitar training but had done some experiments with it on his own, using his knowledge of the guitar as a background. He expressed, very sincerely, his desire to learn sitar from me. I carefully explained to him that one must undergo many long years of study and practice of the basics before one can play even a single note properly. He understood all this perfectly and said he was prepared to go through the years of discipline. I invited him to come to India with his wife Pattie to study and spend some time with me. He accepted enthusiastically. He asked me to his beautiful house in Esher, outside London; and in the few days before I had to leave England, I gave George his first lesson in Indian music.

After I returned to India, George wrote and said he would be able to come and spend six weeks with me. I was pleased and wrote back, telling him to grow a mustache and cut his hair a bit so that he would not be recognized immediately. When we went to pick up George and his wife at the airport, we found that the mustache trick worked--no one recognized either him or Pattie at first, although there had been a lot of publicity in the papers about their visit. They registered for a suite at the Taj Mahal hotel under a false name. But one young Christian pageboy happened to recognize them and truly, within 24 hours, almost all Bombay came to know that George Harrison was there. Huge crowds of teenagers gathered in front of the hotel, headlines appeared in the papers about George's arrival and my telephone started to ring nonstop.

I could not believe it when I saw this mad frenzy of young people, mostly girls from 12 to about 17. I would have believed it in London or Tokyo or New York--but in India! And I realized that young people in our big cities like Bombay or Delhi are no different from any of the other young people of the world. Some of these girls stood for eight to ten hours outside the hotel, screaming at me to send George down and furiously yelling for him. After a few days, I knew the situation was going to get even worse. I couldn't teach and George couldn't practice with all those young people screaming down in the street. Things reached such a state that we had to call a press conference to explain that George had not come as a Beatle but as my disciple, and he asked to be left in peace to work on his music with me. Then we went to Kashmir and Benares and a few other places and spent the rest of his visit in relative quiet. In his lessons, I had George practice all the correct positions of sitting and some of the basic exercises. This was the most that one could do in six weeks, considering that a disciple usually spends years learning these basics. Even so, George came to understand the discipline involved and since then, he has realized how difficult it is to play the sitar and has said that it would take him 40 years to learn to play it properly.

Many people these days think that Indian music is influencing pop music to a high degree. Personally, I do not feel it is truly our music that one finds in pop songs but just the sound of the sitar. Except for a few groups who are musically creative and adventurous, most use sitar in an extremely shallow way, as a new sound or gimmick. Though the sitar is being exploited now by pop groups on both sides of the Atlantic and will no doubt continue to be used this way for some time, those who sincerely love Indian music as classical music should not be upset by this. One instrument can serve many styles of music. The guitar, for instance, has been used in many types of music, including pop and rock, but that has not affected or modified the traditions of playing the classical guitar.

The Beatles scene and the sitar explosion brought me immediately into a position of immense popularity with young people, and now I find myself adored like a movie star or a young singer. But I have had to pay for this. On the one hand, I have been facing criticism from the very "traditional" people in India, who say that I am commercializing and cheapening my music with the pop influence and lowering my standards of playing sitar. These charges I have had to face mostly in my own country, but also to some extent from classical musicians abroad. On the other hand, I was confident about one thing--I knew I would be able to present the correct perspective of our music to young people all over the world, so that they would have a better understanding of it.

Now, I am glad to say, this understanding is indeed growing, though few people are aware of what I have gone through for the past two or three years, trying to explain to my audiences that Indian music is not related to pop or rock music, and cannot be hailed with hooting, cat-calls and whistles and a lot of frenzy, that it is classical in nature and must be listened to with the same serious attitude that one brings to a Bach concert or a program of Mozart or Beethoven.

Along with the teenagers, there was another large group, widely known as hippies, who became my zealous admirers. I found it even more difficult to bring them to an understanding and appreciation of our music from the correct viewpoint. The reason for this was, I felt, that many of them were involved with various kinds of hallucinogenic drugs and were using our music as part of their drug experiences. Though in the beginning I was hurt by their approach to Indian music as a psychedelic, spiritual and erotic experience, I latter realized that it was not wholly their fault. I discovered that a few self-appointed American "gurus" had been propagating misinformation over the past few years about India, saying that almost all our notable ascetics, thinkers and artists use drugs. These "gurus" went as far as saying that one cannot meditate properly, play music or even pronounce the sacred word OM unless one is under the influence of such drugs.

It was, of course, gratifying to see that many people loved India and all its culture, but their expression of this love was superficial and their understanding of India's ways was very shallow. Wearing beads and bells and flowers and carrying joss sticks came across as a mimicry and a mockery of the real thing. India now is overrun by unwashed, rebellious young people. It is really sad to see these young Americans and Europeans from good families and backgrounds who are trying to find some kind of spirituality and peace of mind this way in India and its customs. They do not realize that it is not the true Indian religion, philosophy or thinking they are following but that, because of the association with drugs, they are drawn to perverted and degenerated schools of thought.

On one of my recent visits to the States, several young men came to me to learn sitar. When I first saw them, their appearance filled me with pity--they looked pale and anemic and had shiny, glazed eyes. Their hands shook before their dirty bodies and they showed a strange, unnatural nervousness. When I found later that they were quite talented, I felt even sadder. I learned then that apart from habitually smoking marijuana, these boys were also taking LSD, Methedrine and heroin. I tried to be sympathetic and explained to them that first they had to get rid of these habits before I could consider teaching them. In return, they answered me with the same words I have heard from hundreds of others since--that they feel so much more aware through drugs, that they are so much more spiritual, that the drugs have opened up something inside them that makes everything much more beautiful. The next phase of our conversation was, as I had expected, a criticism of their society. They expressed disgust with Government policies and with the war in Vietnam in particular. I spoke with these boys for a long time, trying to have them see the situation from another point of view.

Over the past few years, I have come to understand young people much better and have found some remarkable people among the somewhat more mature hippies. These people, many of them with an excellent education or practicing knowledge of one of the arts, after years of academic and disciplined lives, try to "expand their minds," as they put it, to find a more meaningful experience through drugs. Personally, I have never considered drugs to be any help in understanding oneself and the world around one, but I can now accept many of these people because of the maturity of their attitude and the awareness of what they are doing. Even so, it hurts me deeply to see young people take to this easy escape from any sadhana, found in hard, disciplined work. I have had a great deal of contact with such young people, especially among my students in the States at my own school in Los Angeles and in the music courses I taught at City College in New York during the fall of 1967. I have tried to make them understand through affectionate, loving but strict teaching that their initial approach to Indian music, in many cases, was wrong, and that even their approach to Indian religion and thought and to the other disciplines of life was not altogether correct. The students listen to me with care and I have had good results with many of them.

I faced a problem with some of my concert audiences from about 1965 until recently, especially in England. Many young people were high, and altogether in another world, and often sat there in front of me carrying on indecently with their girlfriends or boyfriends. They lit cigarettes, if that is all they were, whenever they pleased. Their conduct disgusted me. Too many people in this dazed stupor send out bad vibrations that are extremely upsetting.

As in my young days in India, I started my own rebellion against these rebellious youths. I had to put down my sitar and explain what the music stands for and what it means to me and my guru, and what it meant to his guru and all the generations of musicians who have handed down these sacred traditions to us. I told them how clean and solemn one must be--in body and mind--to be able to produce this music, and insisted that one must be in the same frame of mind to listen to it. Then only can it work its magic, without the need for any outside stimulus.

Now I am happy to know that things have changed to such an extent that this problem has practically disappeared. My audiences everywhere are much more clean and respectful, serious and receptive--particularly in the United States. I am pleased now when older men and women come to me after performances and thank me for helping their son or daughter. What could be more satisfying?

It is ironic that in these very same moments. I am criticized in my own country for "prostituting" my music and commercializing it, for being a hero only to the hippies, for associating my music with drugs and for encouraging dissatisfied youths from the West to flock to India. But the hippies are dead, as they have officially declared, and I am convinced that young people all over the world, after generations of restriction and then years of abuse of their new freedom, are now slowly settling down. With their new, clear awareness, they will show us the way to attain peace, harmony and love.