The storied Beatles Ashram awaits beyond a long and winding road across the Ganges River in Rishikesh, the Himalayan town where The Beatles lived in 1968 and composed their curious chapter of renunciation.

Nearly five decades later, the ashram is derelict yet still alive, a peaceful yet eerie abandoned ghost village that the Rajaji Tiger Reserve is now slowly consuming like endless desires eating away humans and demigods of fame and fortune as The Beatles were circa 1967.

John Lennon (left) and George Harrison leave Londons Heathrow Airport for India on February 15, 1968. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr joined them later.

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The iconic British band met Transcendental Meditation founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in London in 1967, and their India odyssey followed. And worldwide media attention followed them.

I followed The Beatles to Rishikesh with my photographer colleague Raghu Rai, Saeed Naqui reported in Indian newspaper The Statesman. Almost every newspaper in the world had sent their senior reporters. Not to much avail, though. The ashram was out of bounds for the media.

We walked on til I spotted the Maharishi under a tree with The Beatles. I promptly sneaked Raghu Rai in and he took a shot with the aid of his zoom lens. The Statesman had its scoop.

The Beatles and their wives at Rishikesh in March 1968. The group includes Ringo Starr, Maureen Starkey, Jane Asher, Paul McCartney, George Harrison (1943-2001), Patti Boyd, Cynthia Lennon, John Lennon (1940-1980), Beatles roadie Mal Evans, Jenny Boyd, Prudence Farrow and Beach Boy Mike Love.

Four days before my visit to the ashram this month, the Fab Fours The Longand Winding Road was playing on the opposite bank of the Ganges at the 1960s-themed Dilmar Cafe, better known as The Beatles Cafe.

Lights in the Himalayan dusk turned the Ganges into a river of gold, as the Lennon-McCartney lyrics rang appropriately in this ancient town full of seekers of the true way:

The long and winding road, that leads, to your door Will never disappear, Ive seen that road before It always leads me here, lead me to your door . Why leave me standing here, let me know the way.

The Beatles Cafe menu carries The Statesman article on The Beatles initial days in Rishikesh, and their search for the way.

[John] Lennon was the reclusive one, Naqui reported, and [Ringo] Starr was the friendliest. Paul [McCartney] would come and lie down in the Maharishis secretary Suresh Babus cabin and leaf through the copies of the Junior Statesman [the popular Statesman youth magazine of the 1960s].

Artwork at the assembly hall dubbed the Beatles Cathedral. Nearly two generations of Beatles fans have left their mark on the Beatles Ashram.

Gaping windows, piles of dead leaves in rooms, graffiti on still-sturdy walls are all that are left of the modest bungalows that housed some of the worlds most popular stars.

Igloo-like concrete meditation huts facing the Ganges, a wooden shelf in a ruined room that may have held Paul McCartneys books, a bench in a courtyard where John Lennon might have played his guitar, doors of dwellings left still open like residents had popped out for quick chat and never came back.

Archival British news footage of The Beatles in Rishikesh, in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, northern India.

The Beatles came here to renounce worldly pleasures, and search for the richer treasure of inner peace and contentment. Then reality hit them that this was not the way.

The person most skeptical of the Maharishi, Transcendental Meditation and what The Beatles were up to, was Ringo Starr, the Beatles drummer, said the Statesman reporter. Within a day of his arrival, he told me with considerable amusement, Its like a Butlin oliday camp [Billy Butlins budget holiday camps were popular across England]. Starr left for London shortly after.

The Beatles composed about30 songs here (featured on Abbey Road and the White Album), so thisobviously was no serious meditation center.

Beatles memories live on with wild elephants, tigers, monkeys and public art, as the ashram is now part of Rajaji National Park.

Starr had compared Maharishis enterprise to a holiday camp after seeing idlers in ashram robes. Even the Buddha admitted householders straight away into the order of monks, but instituted a three-month trial for ashram dwellers, to see if they could fit into the hard-working discipline needed in his meditation centers.

Given that idling and irrationality did not get them success, The Beatles could not accept that aBand-Aid solution of mantras, or chanting a word, could deal withall of their personal and cosmic problems.

Graffiti on a white wall near the entrance to the Beatles Ashram declared:You cannot escape your demons, you can only slay them.

As I have experienced over the past 24 years, slaying these inner demons needs penetrating depths of the mind, where they are created and multiply as harmful thought patterns.No miracles orgurus can liberate. I often heard Burmese-born Vipassana principal teacher Sayagyi U Goenka (1924-2013) say: Never fall into the clutches of a guru; be self-dependent. The guide shows the way, and the student strives hard to walk on it.

The Beatles with actress Jane Asher, Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd in Rishikesh celebrating George Harrisons 25th birthday on February 25, 1968.

The Beatles Rishikesh saga ultimately became a failed quest for the way.

Like realistic people grounded in common sense, they became uncomfortable with the Jai Gurudev cult around the Maharishi, and they found no way to slay inner demons in dungeons of the mind.

John Lennons wry take on The One Word, The Mantra. His Happy Rishikesh Song ends with a painful Something is wrong, something is wrong.

The disillusioned Beatles left first Ringo Starr, then McCartney a month later, and two weeksafterward Lennon and Harrison. They left behind ghosts of their Himalayan saga, of those here going away without finding the way.

Amid people doing quality work and selfless service, I see such spiritually exploited and exploiters continuing to haunt Rishikesh: victims of marketers of mantras, commercial yoga firms, ritualistic practices, and dangerous delusions of the kind that corrupted a fully Enlightened Super Scientists suffering-ending universal practice into a sectarian distortion called Buddhism (Why the Buddha was not a Buddhist).

The Beatles suffered from bad timing, arriving in India a year too earlyandmissing the path that in 1969, from Mumbai, began flowing again like the Ganges of Dhamma (laws of nature) in the land of its origin.

This timeless path looks for the person when the time ripens, through someone informing that there exists such a way, this practice of experiential wisdomshared entirely free of cost. I wish I had done this sooner, is a common feedback I have heard.

So theres time for you yet, Paul and Ringo, to see ifthis is the wayfor which you took the long and winding Himalayan road.

Raja Murthy is an independent journalist based in Mumbai contributing to Asia Times since 2003, The Statesman since 1990, and formerly for Times of India, Economic Times, Elle, Wisden.com etc. He shuttles between Mumbai and the Himalayas.

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The Beatles haunt a Himalayan 'Long and Winding Road' - Asia Times