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Music

Ravi Hutheesing: Dancin' with Hanson (Source: Amazon (Book cover))
What links the American pop band Hanson and the Nehru-Gandhi family?
Pete Best (Source: Wikipedia (Ex-Beatles drummer Pete Best))
Which member of the most popular rock band ever was born in India?
Sorabji (1977) (Source: Sorabji Archive (Portait: Sir Jeremy Grayson))
Did you know that one of the most talented and gifted composers and pianists that the world has ever seen was part Indian?
Marilyn Monroe in the trailer for the film The Prince and the Showgirl (Source: Wikipedia)
Edgar Allan Poe, Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud, and a Babaji are inexplicably linked. How?
Ian Fleming's original sketch impression of James Bond. (Source: Wikipedia)
How did V.S. Naipaul inadvertently help the James Bond franchise become what it is today?
Meher Baba (1957, Meelan Studos) (Source: Wikipedia)
Which 1988 hit single and winner of three Grammy awards was inspired by this Indian spiritual guru?

Quotable quotes

Barbarous Indian and shrill Western music

In what perfection [Indian] music stands (as I am no competent judge), I could never give my ears the trouble to examine, it seeming loud and barbarous; yet they observe time and measure in their singing and dancing, and are mightily delighted with their tumbling and noise. They as much dislike our shriller music, hardly allowing our waits fit to play to bears, and our stringed instruments strike not their hard-to-be-raised fancies; but our organs are the music of the spheres with them, charming them to listen as long as they play.

Did you know?

A Sikh Animal

Vic Briggs, a guitarist of the British rock band, The Animals, later became interested in Sikh devotional music and its use of the harmonium. He converted to Sikhism (taking on the name Vikram Singh Khalsa) and has performed at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

Bahadur and Ella

The person credited with discovering legendary jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald was a Bardu Ali, his name a corruption of Bahad(o)ur Ali. He was the son of a peddler from Bengal who had settled in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century.