RISHIKESH, India | With their iconic long hair and necklaces of Indian marigolds, the Beatles journeyed to this city in the foothills of the Himalayas in the late 1960s.

They were at the height of their fame, but they came to escape material wealth and the pressures of celebrity.

Their destination: an ashram, where they would study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation.

Today, nearly 40 years later, the guru’s former campus is still known as the Beatles’ ashram, a once-whimsical Hobbiton of 15 acres dotted with cozy igloolike huts and vegetarian food halls. It was here, along the cliffs overlooking the Ganges River, that the Fab Four hunkered down in the spring of 1968 to compose as many as 48 songs, including “Revolution,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Blackbird.”

But many visitors are surprised to find that the ashram, now owned by the government, is closed and dilapidated, filled with overgrown weeds and slowly being destroyed by desperately poor villagers who loot the teak furnishings and sell them for firewood.

There is, however, a new vision for the ashram.

Maggie O’Hara, a former Hollywood actress who has lived in India running schools for the poor for 30 years, has submitted a plan to the government to turn the ashram into a home and school for 2,500 street children from New Delhi, about 115 miles away. She would also open a job training and rehabilitation center for 500 women.

Ten of the 500 rooms would be used as an eco-hotel, where guests could volunteer to work with the children or simply relax in the same ashram where John Lennon searched for the meaning of life and George Harrison worked to perfect his sitar playing.

“Helping India’s children would be in the spirit of what the Beatles were in India searching for: generosity, optimism, kindness,” said O’Hara.

So far the government has been unresponsive to the plan.

(Source- The Washington Post)