Few people will ever be able to claim the cultural impact of the East upon the West in the way that great sitar player and teacher Ravi Shankar achieved in his lifetime. That influence is well documented through his most celebrated involvement with The Beatles, especially George Harrison, and will be developed in the many tributes from knowing people on the news of his death yesterday.
In many ways listening to his music as a young teenager was as much a fashion as a genuine aural commitment, but whatever the initial impulse, its enduring positive effects were genuine. If I listen to the very few albums I have of his today, they propel me back immediately to the hope of those days and as much of a spirituality that I have ever achieved which was a belief in peace, love and the power of music, no matter how naive that belief. Listening was as near to meditating as I ever attained as well.
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