Track 9: Illusion At Play: A Paean to Strawberry Fields Forever by Abhik Ganguly
I was hurrying to catch my ride at the Red Fort metro station. Pregnant monsoon clouds hovered over my head, and it started raining tumultuously. The raindrops felt like pinpricks against my back. Most of the shops were bereft of their patrons. Suddenly, my ear picked up a tune from a distant shop, which seemed hauntingly familiar.
I marched closer to the shop to hear where the tune was emanating from. It was the refrain of Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles: "Nothing is real, nothing to get hung about.” I’d never expected to hear a Beatles record playing in a vinyl shop in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. I stood outside this shop for a while.
In Japan, it is customary for individuals to honor their favorite artists by waiting, silently and alone, outside their homes until they are invited inside. I stood outside the shop in the rain, in honor of the four lads from Liverpool, until the song finished. Then I reached the station and boarded my metro. The refrain kept playing in the back of my mind as I got thrown back to more than a decade ago, when I’d first heard this tune as a teenager.
Around the early 2010s, the internet had still not caught on here. Some of us would use cassettes and tape recorders, while others used CD players. I was in High School and, in my early teenage years, had developed this sense of alienation. Where what my friends said and did felt quite strange and separate from what appealed to me.
Instead, I felt at home with my high school seniors. They would invite me to team up with them for quizzes and music competitions. Being an amateur keyboardist helped me a lot with the latter. We would hang out and jam on a small hillock above the basketball court at our school. Once after one such jam session, all the band members left for their homes, except for a senior and me.
We sat in silence, basking in the wintry sun. A strange and surreal form of awareness pervaded us. Suddenly, words came out of his mouth like the utterances of a wise sage: “Nothing makes sense, right?” I gave him a blank reaction in response. He continued, “Have you heard Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles?” I replied in negative. Very calmly, he took a worn-out cassette marked "Magical Mystery Tour" from his bag and handed it to me.
The worn-out label had little fractures running along the plastic shell and frayed edges that gave the impression that it had survived decades. The title sprung out in a bold, vintage typeface, partially peeling but still discernible. It looked like an ember of a distant era, with its bright red and yellow artwork slightly smeared. Visible through the glass cover, the cassette's reels were neatly packed. It seemed almost mythical, as though this tiny relic contained a whole universe of mystical experiences that were just waiting to be discovered.
That evening, I listened to my first ever song by The Beatles. And thus began an endless fascination with them, which continues to this day. John Lennon’s haunting fever dream-like vocals and the song’s intro with Mellotron had reached the inner precipice of my heart. The vocals seemed to float over complex chord progressions, which unsurprisingly felt like a dream that echoed the disillusionment of being thrust into adolescence.
The second stanza hit like a corkscrew to my mind: “Living is easy with eyes closed/ Misunderstanding all you see/ It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out/ It doesn't matter much to me.” The dissonant melodies accompanying these lines captured the ache in my heart that everything was transitory; we are but a fleeting speck in the larger picture of the cosmos.
At this time, I felt I had lost the wonder of childhood simplicity. I couldn’t quite communicate it to others. However, this one senior had felt exactly the same as me. Now, as an adult, it feels peculiar that I found solace in a song from the late 1960s by an English rock band. But the song felt like a safe space, as though Lennon were singing directly to me. The song’s dense and layered sounds mirrored the tensions that were brewing in my mindscape. Its dreamy, silk-like texture and psychedelic overtones complemented the feeling of expanded consciousness I was starting to feel. It stood there as an invisible friend and helped me cross the threshold between childhood and adulthood.
As my metro station was about to come, I comprehended the song in a different way now. Strawberry Fields Forever now feels like a mystical revelation about māyā, the illusory character of the world, given my current understanding of Vedāntic philosophy. Lennon's lyric, "Nothing is real," is a reflection of the Vedāntic idea that the material world, which we consider to be stable and unchanging, is not real.
Vedānta, a Hindu school of philosophy, teaches that the material world is an illusion (māyā) and that ultimate truth lies in realizing the unity of the Self (Ātman) with the Absolute (Brahman). The song's odd, discordant chords and erratic melodic changes now seem to reflect how fleeting and false the world we cling to is. What was once disenchantment is now illumination, an understanding of māyā, the transient aspect of existence.
Now, when I hear the song again, I realize that it serves as a manual for absorbing the harsh realities of growing up. Lennon's invitation is to "take you down" to this other state of awareness, where the laws of normal perception no longer hold true. This song's hallucinogenic undertones and fluctuating harmonies correspond with the Vedāntic teachings of impermanence and non-duality, suggesting an expanded consciousness and a peek at a world beyond the material.
Strawberry Fields Forever planted a seed of consciousness that just grew larger in my mind as I got older. Today, instead of leaving me feeling disillusioned, what at first seemed like a mystical mirror of my adolescent sorrow now resonates with a greater awareness of life's illusions at play.
Abhik Ganguly is a poet, writer, and seeker. Currently, he's a Junior Research Fellow pursuing his PhD at the Department of English, University of Delhi. His works have been published in various outlets like the Monograph, Indian Review, Hooghly Review, Setu Magazine, Criterion Journal, and others.
X handle - @GangulyRicky and Instagram handle - @abhik_ganguly_
