On his 76th birth anniversary, an open letter to the late John Lennon

Dear John,

It's been so long since you were taken so brutally away from us thirty-six years ago and yet your music, images and words are so palpably with us that it feels like you never left at all.

Again and again, as I watch your images and hear your songs, I find myself mesmerised by you, the caustic, cerebral Beatle, the one who so strikingly evolved, from a moppet-headed cherubic lad to the almost ascetic-looking, gaunt-cheeked apostle of peace and love.

Right from the start, you had always been my favorite, the one who'd won my heart with his words and wit, the one who sketched and drew and turned out books full of wordplay and puns, the one who said and did all the coolest things, the one way ahead of his time.

Of course, as part of the Lennon-McCartney team that wrote such a staggering amount of hits for the world's most successful band, it is difficult to say how much of the collective charisma of your band mates added to your charm and success, but even when you all dressed in identikit dark drainpipe suits and sported the same hair cuts, you were hard to miss.

Your irreverence, spontaneity and mischievous grin in your younger years heralded the iconoclast activist and visionary you grew into.

So many anecdotes, utterances and memories come flooding in on your birthday.

When you were once asked in school what you wanted to be in life, you had apparently answered 'happy', and when you were reprimanded and told you had not understood the question, you had responded by saying the interrogator had not understood life.

At a concert for the Queen and the upper echelons of London society, you had famously declared that those in the cheap seats should clap while those in the front rows 'should rattle their jewels'.

You took on the Nixon presidency, the Vietnam war and the bigotry and hypocrisy of your times, staging peace protests, love-ins and demonstrations; you stood up against the world and members of your own band when they disapproved of the woman you loved; and when your second child Sean was born, knowing how you had neglected Julian, your first, you had voluntarily set aside five years of your career to become a house husband and devote your time to bring him up and nurture him with love.

Of course you were no saint. Your escapades in Hamburg at the start of your career, your experimenting with LSD and heroin, the craziness of your 'lost weekend' that lasted 18 months, the way you mercilessly teased Brian Epstein, your manager who'd been in love with you, about his homosexuality and his Jewishness, all pointed to a deeply-scarred psyche and many childhood wounds.

But how you rose above it, the sadness of being abandoned by your father in your formative years, the sorrow of being rejected by your mother, who could never really give you the security you needed, and the tragedy of losing her to a senseless car accident would have felled a lesser man; for you, it had all became material, from which you created some of the greatest songs known to your generation, songs that became anthems, songs that brought so much joy and comfort to the world that they certainly made it a better place.

Of course, I was almost a generation younger than you and given that India was so remote and disconnected from the rest of the world, most of your life got lost in translation by the time it arrived on our shores. But even so, your impact on our lives here was immense, your presence was tangible and of course your tragic and senseless death to a deranged man's bullets cut us to the bone.

It's hard to say which of your songs, appearances or phases was your best. The early collaborative peppy pop ballads that could reduce a stadium of hysterical women to a quivering screaming mess, or the later soulful, angst-ridden solo albums that you created with Yoko Ono, which sounded like primal cries.

Which was the real John – the essential Lennon, or was he continuously a work in progress, evolving so rapidly from arrogant rock star to thinker, dreamer and apostle of peace?

What would you have been if you had not died at forty, John? Where would your journey have brought you had you lived to see your seventy-sixth birthday today? And what message would you have for our troubled times?
All this, I write today to you on your birthday, to tell you how very grateful I am that you lived and loved and tried to show us the way, to wish you as you undoubtedly celebrate with Sergeant Pepper, the Walrus and Lucy in the Sky today and of course, to thank you for the music.

And yes, they may say you're a dreamer, but of course you're not the only one…

With every good wish John,
Yours sincerely etc.