Reading ‘India Psychedelic: The Story of a Rocking Generation’ by Sidharth Bhatia, is sure to get your heart to beat with the rhythm of this book. There is something about this book that touches you. You can tell by the way Bhatia wrote the book, that he actually cared about those people (read artists), their music and the struggle. The book guides you through a whole pack of bands and styles with rare images - black and white and color photos, band posters, LP records and LP record sleeves, all that were part of the 60s and 70s.Bhatia is a journalist and writer based in Mumbai. In 2015, along with two other colleagues, he founded The Wire, an independent digital news site.

Before that he has worked in print and television and in 2005, after many years of being away abroad, returned to India to join the founding team of DNA newspaper. After nearly 5 years, he quit to write books. His books are mainly about popular culture and society.

In 2014, he wrote his third book, ‘India Psychedelic - The Story of a Rocking Generation’ where he tried to capture the spirit of the 1960s and ‘70s, when a new, post-Raj generation came of age, who grew up in post-independent India, and had none of the inhibitions of their parents. It showed in various ways, in their appearance, and in their fashions and most of all, in their attitudes. Most of all it registered in their music - rebellious and noisy.

Delving a bit deeper into the book, we look at India in the 1960s and early 1970s: a nation of perennial shortages. Into the staid and conservative landscape come floating in the sounds of ‘Love, love me do’. Four young boys from Liverpool in 1962 set off a storm that swept teenagers in every remote corner of the world. In socialistic India, too, youngsters put on their dancing shoes to groove to this new sound, so different from anything they had heard till then. Some grew their hair, put on their bell-bottoms and picked up their guitars and the Indian pop and rock revolution was born. But it was not just the music that was important.

As Sidharth Bhatia’s colourful and incisive book tells us, it was an attempt by a new, post-independence generation – midnight’s children – to assert their own voice. Theirs was a voyage of self-discovery, as they set out to seek freedom and liberation from older attitudes and values. At the end of this era, nothing – politics, society and fashion – would ever be the same again.

He states, “The pop revolution started by The Beatles in 1962 swept the world and hit India too, which was a socialist economy and prone to shortage. Imports were prohibitively expensive and guitars, amplifiers and even records were not available. All India Radio hardly played pop and later rock. Yet, these young Indians played the same music as was being played in the west”.

How did this happen? How did they connect with a global youth culture? Bhatia tells the true story from the mind of the band members. It is a really amazing story of an era gone by.

This book will inspire many, and as for me, I will have it on my shelf until it inevitably crumbles into its own yellowy paper universe.

If you are a musician or an artist of that era, this is a book you should read.

The book was released at the Oxford Bookstore Connaught Place on 27^th February, 2014. The author was in conversation with eminent journalist, Sreenivasan Jain. 

Publisher: Harper Collins

Language: English

Pages: 224

By Verus Ferreira