Oxford Bookstore celebrates Sidharth Bhatia’s ‘India Pyschedelic

Oxford Bookstore Connaught Place celebrated Sidharth Bhatia’s book, ‘India Pyschedelic, The story of a Rocking Generation’ on February 27, 2014.

The author was in conversation with eminent journalist, Sreenivasan Jain. The book brings to its audience, the never-before-told story of the rock music scene in India of the 1960s and ’70s.

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.