Word: sitars
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...summer a young rock singer (Michael York) visits India searching for the new sound of the sitar. He pledges his fealty to a musician-mystic (Utpal Dutt) and becomes involved with a clattering entourage of fellow acolytes, musicians and the mandatory wide-eyed British bird (Rita Tushingham). Like Mia Farrow with the Maharishi, the singer finds that his lessons are exercises in disenchantment. The guru prates of selflessness but demands instant obedience to his whims. He hints of asceticism and keeps two wives busy and jealous. He considers himself a brilliant musician -until his guru denounces his technique as commercial...
...they would charm them right up to the moment at which one designated Thug would seize a doomed man's wrists while another Thug would strangle him from behind with a noose of white or yellow silk-Kali's favorite colors. Sometimes talented Thugs would play the sitar and coax their victims into singing, the better to expose their throats for throttling...
Shankar should know. After the Beatles introduced the resonant sound of the stringed sitar to rock in Norwegian Wood (1965) and their imitators began twanging along, Shankar suddenly found himself the hero of the pop, hippie and fashion worlds. Then, just as suddenly, the fad passed. The teeny-boppers returned to their Bee Gees, and the hippies began playing Erik Satie at their acid parties. Though dismayed by the abruptness of it all, Shankar realized that it was probably just as well. With good reason. Horror of horrors, he confided, "they took me for a pop musician...
...Shankar also proved something else: that Indian music means a lot more than just the sitar and its familiar partners, the two-drum tabla and the string-drone tamboura. Indian music has its origins in Vedic hymns that date back 2,000 years. Indians have always believed that music has the power to change human destiny. Their sacred chants had to be intoned just so; a mistake could ruin everything. Thus, if Vocalist Jitendra Abhisheki seemed ner vous as he came out for a selection of Vedic chants, it was understandable. But his nasal, three-note invocation to Saraswati, goddess...
...slightly raised platform a musician (Jeff Fuller) sits improvising, in an appropriate raga, a preludial alapa on his sitar. Gradually a number of young men enter, wearing leis of orange and yellow flowers, and assume yoga positions. As bowls of incense waft their frangance, the sitar is joined off-stage by the traditional tambura drone and tabla rhythms...