Sunday Snippets
By Venkatesh Raghavan
I am reminded of the first time I began hearing the Beatles. It was way back in the early eighties, when my elder cousin Srikant played his tape recorder in our house. My Beatles favourite in those days was “Can’t Buy Me Love.” In fact, when Sriknath used to go for his bath, I used to rewind the tape recorder just to hear “Can’t Buy Me Love,” again.
Subsequently, I started loving the entire Oldies songs from the Beatles, namely “Hard Day’s Night”, “I wanna hold your hand,” “From me to you,” “Love me do,” “I saw her standing there,” and “Baby it’s you.” As years passed, I gathered my own collection of the Beatles albums. The one album I could not get hold of for a long time was “The Beatles Rarities.” I got a lucky break when my friend Kannan Srinivasan who was in love with a girl from our college belonging to the Arts stream had picked up a fight with her.
He asked me to follow him till the bus stop that was a few hundred yards from her home and wait for him to come back. After waiting for half-an-hour in the sun, I returned home hoping his love-tiff will get settled in God’s good time. After about an hour, I received a surprise. Kannan came home and handed over the Beatles Rarities cassette to me. He told me that he had asked his girlfriend Shima to give something in exchange for my waiting outside her premises.
Some of my favourite numbers from the Rarities happen to be Across the Universe, My guitar gently weeps, Rain, Got To Get you Into my life, and Taxman. I thought for a while, musing on this unexpected gift. I then secretly started yearning that Kannan and Shima pick up more fights so that I can get more gifts. As time passed, I got hooked to melodious numbers like Strawberry fields, Something, Eleanor Rigby, Long and winding road, “She’s leaving home”, In my life, Lucy in the sky with diamonds, I am a loser and the memorable oldie, “Ticket to Ride.”
I found Strawberry fields so appealing that I started to love and savour strawberries besides gobbling strawberry ice creams in the early days of my journalistic career. John Lennon’s Imagine became my favourite in the days that passed. The last stanza is very catchy and still lingers in my mind: “You may say, that I am a dreamer; But I am not the only one; I hope someday, you will join us; And the world will live as one.”
Years later, I was able to view the videos of my favourite songs when put up at my friend Rakesh Sheshadri’s house. It was Paul McCartney playing “Close your eyes and I will kiss you,” “We can work it out,” and “Day Tripper.” I also started acquiring trivia about the Beatles. It was disclosed that the song “Let it Be,” with wordings, “Mother Mary comes to me,” was nothing to do with the divine Mother for the Catholic Church. It was about Paul’s mother Mary. One of the old tunes that at times jumps from memory still is “Yellow Submarine.”
