That’s irony, eight days a week

Western tourists seeking the point of it all will soon be able to fail to find it by visiting a shrine to four rich young dupes on the very spot where they went in search of the point of it all and failed to find it.

Here’s a story to please anyone who thinks that the signature note of the universe is irony. But first a little research task for you.

Go find someone of my generation. It shouldn’t be hard. Look for a stately mien, hard-earned wisdom and slumping dugs. If unsure ask for help fixing your cellphone. If your interviewee bursts out laughing, you’re there.

Now tell him or her you want to know the first thought that comes into their mind when you say the word maharishi. And I’ll wager a fat bottle of shiraz that anyone my age will say the Beatles.

To my generation, all pop music is a footnote to the Beatles. When I was young it was compulsory to have an opinion on all four members of the group. I thought Lennon pretentious, McCartney saccharine and the other two characterless and I’ve seen no reason since to change my view. Like everyone else I’ve got several Beatles songs seared in my skull but that’s only because the tunes were catchy. The lyrics had all the profundity of a mid-priced greeting card.

Nevertheless the group was known as the Fab Four. Fab is short for fabulous and the sixties craved fabulous. The west was emerging from a black and white post war world and wanted colour. The young derided the supposed wisdom of their elders and sought something to replace it. They didn’t know what that something was, but they knew it was fab and they sought it here and they sought it there. They sought it in drugs and sex. They sought it in music and dancing. They sought it in communal living and preaching peace.

They sought it, indeed, until they got a bit older and ran out of money. Whereupon they stopped seeking it, got a haircut and set about rediscovering the wisdom of their elders. Which they rediscovered so very well that they are now the generation in suits and ties and power.

The Fab Four, however, never had to get a haircut or a job, because they had achieved the money and the fame that were always the point of it all. But they obviously couldn’t acknowledge that money and fame were the point of it all, so they went looking for another point of it all.

Their quest took them to India to sit at the feet of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He occupied a flower-strewn platform and practised a form of meditation that went back thousands of years, and a form of profitable self-promotion that went back even further. He lived on the banks of the sacred Ganges in an ashram that had been established way back in the mists of five years before. It had been built with money donated by a Californian heiress, was aimed at similar wealthy Westerners and was surrounded with barbed wire to keep the Indians out.

Great claims were made for transcendental meditation. It not only brought spiritual benefits to its devotees, but it would also bring actual benefits to the world as a whole if enough people practised it. The plan was to set up meditative hubs around the globe, each of which would radiate good vibrations into the surrounding ether and thus bring about peace on Earth. I am not joking.

History suggests little in the way of success. Of the few rigorous scientific studies into transcendental meditation, one found that most meditators just fell asleep, and another that the meditative state was physiologically indistinguishable from sitting with your eyes closed.

To their credit, the Fab Four saw through it pretty quick. Ringo left within a week, the rest within two months. And they seemed to forget about eastern mysticism after that and went seeking alternative points of it all in Japanese conceptual artists, Scottish lochs, onelegged women and other spiritual bullseyes. But their brief foray to India had left us all with an indelible image of the long-haired maharishi sitting crosslegged among flowers, and saying ommmm.

The maharishi died in 2008 by which time his ashram had long since fallen out of use and become part of a tiger sanctuary. But now the local authorities have acquired it and are planning to refurbish it as – wait for it – a museum of homage to the Beatles.

And thus it is that western tourists seeking the point of it all will soon be able to fail to find it by visiting a shrine to four rich young dupes on the very spot where they went in search of the point of it all and failed to find it. And I have to admit that it sometimes seems to me that if it weren’t for the lovely irony of things there’d be no point to it all at all.