Guest Columnist.

Mike Love pays tribute to the late Ravi Shankar, as well as the slain children and educators in Newtown, Connecticut in a Huffington Post guest column.

The Beach Boys front-man says his first exposure to Indian music came in 1968, at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's retreat. "George Harrison and I both shared our birthdays in India that year, and music was a big part of our celebrations. It was George's personal relationship with Ravi Shankar, and his tremendous interest in sitar and other instruments native to India which became the vessel that connected Eastern and Western worlds."

Love adds, "The best music, for me, comes from three places: the heart, the spirit and the actual locale synonymous with the sounds you're hearing. With just a few plucks of his sitar, Ravi Shankar captured all three at once. You could hear something personal, you could hear the lively villages of Varanasi, and you could hear the heavens."