Pammi Singh gave Delhi its first discotheque, the Cellar (now DV8) where the young ate, danced, loved, and stripped to psychedelic music.

Madhu Sarin, a reputed psychoanalyst now, then a young student of Miranda House recounts how Westerners braving six day bus rides via Afghanistan and Pakistan would come to Delhi in search of that eastern oriental magic. Hundreds of young men and women would sit stoned in what is now Palika making love in the open under the starry, starry sky.

But the flower power in India was limited to a minority and pulled in mainly aberrants. Where the family structure was deeply entrenched, the youth were not drawn to such influences.

Socially, politically, culturally in India - the seventies was a tumultuous period which saw the 1971 war and the excesses of the emergency followed by the fragile janata government. Other major events were churning India which were to shape the society we live in today.

Says Dr Raj Shrivastava of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies: "The sixties had been the period of hope. The optimism sprung from independence was still heady. The inspiring leaders were still around. There was much expected from the government policies, the five year plans. But through the seventies, disillusionment had started creeping in. Industrialisation brought in benefits only to the urban and the rural were left behind in the scheme of development. The people and the leadership were being torn asunder." The Congress slogan garibi hatao proved a façade as it continued with policies which benefited only the bourgeois. The migration from the rural to the industrialised urban in search of a livelihood began in the seventies.

Discontent with the government policies led to the surge of the leftist-maoist movement in the universities.
The naxalite movement was then coming up in West Bengal. Jai Prakash Narayan led the anti-corruption Gujarat Nav Nirman movemnt which formed the basis for his later call of Sampoorna Kranti movement in Bihar.

Social factors were reflected in the new wave cinema which swept India with Bhuvan Shome, Sara Akash and later Ankur in 1974. Mrinal Sen's films on the Maoist-inspired Naxalite movement of the early 1970s - marked by the trilogy Interview(1971), Calcutta 71(1972) and Padatik/The Guerrilla Fighter (1973) became rallying points for naxalites who would gather at these screening in Calcutta to discuss issues and raise slogans.

In popular cinema, the anger and the frustration of the people found a vent with the birth of the angry young man - Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer.

On the art scene in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, Gieve Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Vivan Sundaram, Ganesh Pyne and Bikash Bhattacharjee portrayed the discontent and the pain of the people on canvas.

Rajneesh, lsd, flower power, hippies did not jolt India. India always had a traditon of gurus, yogis many among whom had been using and experimenting with drugs long before to attain mystical heights in their own ways. The nanga babas, the aghoris were all a part of the Indian psyche. Siddhis, tantras had always been there. So the flower movement gave the common masses no new high.

Says Madhu Sarin, the seventies were a time of turbulence among youth worldwide albeit expressed in different ways. While earlier revolutions were at the level of politics, Nehruvian policies, this was at the level of the youth - a whole era of youth rebellion. The east-west fusion we see today actually has its roots in the intermingling of the youth in the seventies."

Leaders like Ram Vilas Paswan, Laloo Prasad Yadav who claim to give a voice to the backward have also sprung from the socialist movements of the seventies. The hell raisers then are media czars, corporate ceos and eminent filmmakers today and the ideas of the seventies seem to have seen their fruition in the nineties.