New Delhi, July 26 -- Rock critic Lester Bangs once famously called The Beatles "the firstest with the mostest". A phrase that is patently true, even if Bangs used it ironically. The Beatles certainly were the first to a staggering number of new experiences within pop culture, not to mention re-writing or inventing new ways of composing, recording and delivering popular music.

They were also the first in other, less apparent, if equally important ways, like growing up together within an intense maelstrom of public scrutiny, falling apart in a fog of recrimination and sorrow just when divorce became a real cultural phenomenon, and charting very individualistic lives in the aftermath, while very much remaining a "Beatle".

All this is fair...