16 years old and the terrace balcony of our second-floor DDA flat seemed as good a place as any to mourn the loss of John Lennon – almost 2 decades after he’d been shot. I sat there, walkman in hand, earphones firmly embedded, weeping silently, listening to ‘Love‘.

“Love is free, free is love,
Love is living, living love,
Love is needing to be loved.”

It’d been over a year since a close friend gave me my first mixed tape ever – a collection of Beatles‘ tracks. Until then, life had been pretty comfortable under that rock where I’d been living because I had no idea who they were and what they did (beyond ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’, which we’d sung at school and which I thought was, well, pretty lame).

The contents of this mixed tape were devious – a brilliant mix of the standards & more obscure tracks, of old Beatles and new Beatles. It had Hey Jude, Across The Universe and Yesterday. It also had Bungalow Bill, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You and Eleanor Rigby. I wore that magnetic tape out like it was the last thing left post nuclear apocalypse. Thanks to The Beatles, 1996-97 was the year I lost my heart to all things music.

It was like a secret handshake that I’d been considered worthy enough to learn. I will never, ever forget the first time I heard Come Together (I thank the good lord I dodged the million cover versions out there). What was that booming, driving sound that made my rib-cage go badoom-badoom? The bass. The bass. I was on my way home after xeroxing some school notes, when I decided that the bass would be my favourite sound from now on.

Other revelations of a more personal kind followed. I was a pretty lonely teenager, who felt unseen & unheard. I knew I was different from my family but didn’t know how. Music – and more specifically The Beatles – opened the door to my insides. Suddenly, emotions weren’t silly. In fact, feelings were things so important that songs were being written about them. Love, loneliness, pain, triumph – all the things I couldn’t express outwardly in my ‘normal’ life, I could feel through song.

Of course, as The Beatles (and other great popular acts like Michael Jackson, The Stones etc.) have done for countless others before me, they laid open the portal to music in general. I ventured into deeper waters: Led Zeppelin, Sting, The Doors, U2…some, I made lifelong companions, others I let go of. As I grew older, I developed an individual taste in music, separate from my rock-loving, Floyd-digging, college concert-hopping friends. Just as I developed an individual set of values, writing style, work ethic and dress sense. The Beatles? They survived the transition from cassette to Ipod (the best of only, no complete works) but were seldom played. I thought I’d moved on.

Then American Idol 2010 happened. Beatles Week. I found myself tearing up, listening to tunes that were my teenage companions be reinvented by aspiring popstars – some of them listening to The Beatles for the first time ever. It was a musical homecoming – in as much as it is possible to go home again.

And so, I took out all my Beatles stuff from cold storage and rifled through those old songs again. Stumbled upon a journal entry from that night in 1997, when I sat on my balcony crying. I heard, once again, my elder sister’s worried voice asking what was wrong and a young girl, yearning to connect with something real, exclaim in gut wrenching tones – “John Lennon….he’s uh….he’s (sniff)…he’s DEAD!!”