An open letter to Andrea Bocelli on his performance with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra

Dear Mr Bocelli,

I write to tell you how moved I was when I heard you sing this week at Mumbai's Brabourne Stadium with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the internationally-renowned Zubin Mehta in front of a packed audience of 8,000.

As your celestial voice filled with purity and light soared over the stadium, embracing us all, stirring emotions we scarcely knew we harboured, touching the open skies and the pristine full moon above, I understood what Celine Dion meant when she had said "If God would have a singing voice, he must sound a lot like Andrea Bocelli."

I found myself wondering if such a pure sound was only within the realms of possibility from someone who could not see; someone who had tragically lost his sight at the age of twelve due to an accident while playing a childhood game.

Someone who, it seems, God wanted to spare.

Because truth be told Mr Bocelli, there is so much that is distressing in the world around us these days, so much that weighs us down, that a voice like yours reminding us of what we could and should have been could only emanate perhaps, from one inured from the nastiness and pettiness of ordinary life.

Take my city Mumbai, for instance. Just as well you were spared its wretched inequities. The ragged sleeping children on the streets, the shabby potholed roads, the chaos and the chicanery, the daily struggle for existence and the grotesque sense of entitlement that defines its rich and powerful.

Today, in my country there is a sense of unease, as the beasts of communalism and intolerance, which we thought we had long been rid of, roam freely in our hearts and minds. Communities that had lived and loved together are riven with suspicion and distrust. Hindus against Muslims. Upper castes against lower. Sects against sects.

Each day as we open the newspapers and read of senseless violence and mindless killings, it appears as if we are teetering out of control, that we are unstoppable and beyond redemption.

And I haven't even begun to tell you of the deep unassailable gash that exists between the genders or what is being done to the women of my country, Mr Bocelli.

Raped, tortured, abused, denied, burnt, disfigured and killed even before they are born, the women of my country face lives of unspeakable cruelty and injustice.

Denied of their rights, denied their true place in society, whether it is in cities or in villages, it is just as well that someone like you, a man who sings so passionately of love and dreams and hopes and joy – is spared this sight.
And it is not only my country that reels from pain and suffering.

Everywhere one looks on this sad and embittered planet, there is agony and torment. Medieval militancy on the rise in one area, regressive factionalism in another, the gaping maw of meanness in the third.

Country against country, race against race, region against region.

And the earth getting more weary and depleted each day as man's greed and selfishness robs it of its plentitude, plundering its rivers, destroying its forests and seas, erasing its rhythms and rhymes so that it now trembles with earthquakes and weeps in tsunamis like a frightened child.

And this is only the big picture, Mr Bocelli. I have not begun to tell you of the loneliness and bleakness of ordinary lives.

How people are full of despair and heartache, killing themselves and each other with alarming frequency, resorting to drugs and delinquencies, worshipping at the feet of demons and dervishes just to get them through their days.

Truth be told Mr Bocelli, I did not want to make this letter a litany of lament. I started it wanting to tell you how affected I was by your performance and what a privilege it was to hear you in person.

But just as it's only when the dawn breaks that we realise how dark the night was, when the rains come that we know how parched the earth is, it was only on hearing your beautiful, ethereal voice that I realised how wretched we all really are.

As I saw you standing on the stage, your lean, elegant frame consumed by the act of singing; your eyes closed as if drawing from an inner reservoir of God-given beauty, I realised that you sing because your spirit is untouched by all that man has made of this world.

Your voice is a call of the cosmos and we are so fortunate that it is still there to remind us of what lies within. Of what could have been.

Thank you, Mr Bocelli. And now it is time to say goodbye.

With every good wish etc.

malavikasmumbai@gmail.com
(The columnist believes in the art of letter writing)