Farhan Akhtar to play Pandit Ravi Shankar: Decoding the sitar maestro’s influence on The Beatles and George Harrison

That difference in attitude created an early tension. Shankar would later say of the first sitar-heavy Beatles track, “I was very shocked. I didn’t like it at all.” He added, with characteristic bluntness, that it sounded “so terrible” to him. The honesty matters. This was not a guru indulging a pop experiment. It was a classical musician refusing to flatter fame.