During the long period of the Indian lockdown across the summer of 2020, my home became an attractive hotel on the edge of town along the Badrinath Road, called Hotel Sixties Greenhills. Here I might be found many a day sitting in the garden restaurant, reading or contemplating the issues of the day.
And thence I returned just a week ago to continue my sojourn in Rishikesh. It seemed unimaginable to stay anywhere else, so inevitably I would always have come back here. The place hasn’t changed much, still themed around 1960s popular music and counter culture, the original inspiration being the much vaunted visit by the Beatles to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968, critically rasing awareness of Indian culture and religion in the West and lending a catalytic imperative for the subsequent exponential growth of what is now called New Age.
I am not someone who is in any way nostalgic for the music of their youth, so I am probably not the best person to review the 60s restaurant given its focus and the music played throughout day and evening, but it is clearly very popular with many of the people who visit here, possibly of younger generations finding novelty in the fifty year old vintage music scene. I wonder how much the majority of these folk really know about those now long passed days which were seen as something of a Zeitgeist, a time of musical innovation and counter culture rebellion against prevailing post war social norms, with Flower Power, Woodstock, free love, protest songs and experimentation with the then new generation of psychoactive substances made famous by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, and eagerly seized upon by rock groups of the day, both to mediate their own forays into the psychological dark, as well as lend a sense of the exotic to their brand names. Zeitgeist or otherwise, the protest songs, experimentation with new mores and spiritualities seem not to have realised their potential or to have effected any lasting, meaningful change in making the world a better place, but probably this isn’t the place to be debating why.
For me, it is strange though to see how the people of that time, ordinary humans as they were, have been worked into a kind of new mythology that idolises them, when many were simply lost. The flirtation with Eastern philosophy and methodologies, morphing into new age beliefs and practices as they did, didn’t seem to help them much. Some died young, members of the infamous so-called 27 club, as with Doors’ Jim Morrison, some were murdered because of their fame as John Lennon, himself purportedly disillusioned by the mere humanity of the spiritual teachers he had sought guidance from, whilst others succumbed to the effects of their wealth, fame, and unlimited access to rocks’ heavy fuels: alcohol and drugs. But possibly I am being cynical!
Music apart, the vibe and, importantly, the cuisine are good here: multicultural and original from Indian to Italian and generally distinct in a town where otherwise many of the cafés and restaurants serve food typical of the region.
In the days following the gradual reopening of life across the summer of 2020, the Beatles café and garden restaurant were largely the haunt of the many Westerners still resident then in the two popular districts of Rishikesh: Laxman Jhula and Tapovan. Memories of life at the restaurant include eclectic cosmopolitan gatherings of French, Brazilians, Russians, Germans, Israelis, Brits, Spaniards and so on. Occasionally there were more unusual events like a wedding celebration between an Australian man and a Spanish girl who had met at an ashram before the lockdown, and, as time passed, decided to formalise their love with a marriage ceremony at a local temple. Later they disappeared back in the direction of Europe and I still wonder how they are doing and how they recall their strange nuptuals in such a place, at such a time, in such a way.
