For your admirers every day is a celebration of your art, yet this day remains special. Today we celebrate the extraordinary fortune of having been born in the era of your music.

Be it the tactile brushes with the sublime you have given us to experience, the signature nuances that at once beguile and bewilder, the subtle graces that surpass our imagination of what impact a human voice can effect, you have rewarded listeners manifold.

Your music has united and forged close ties between people from diverse walks of life, belonging to different generations and geographies. It has invited people, regardless of what part of India they belong, to discover songs in other unfamiliar languages you have sung in, and gain proximity with these. For the longest time, you have represented and come to define a seminal part of the Indian identity.

With reverence and gratitude, a wish for your long life. May generations of Indians come to discover and appreciate the raajasik beauty (as my friend coined it) of Lata Mangeshkar's voice.