By  Anil Netto
The judges and the audience smirked when the dowdy, frumpy middleaged villager said her dream was to try and be a professional singer. But after singing just the first few notes of her I dreamed a dream from Les Miserables, Susan Boyle had them eating out of her hands. At the end of a performance that reduced many to tears, the anonymous villager had become a global celebrity.

Since then, the unemployed 48-year-old community worker has become one of the biggest sensations on Youtube, with tens of millions of viewers. (Over 40 million people have witnessed her performance on the Internet at the time of writing, a figure that could reach 70 million by the time you read this.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =9lp0IWv8QZY

What makes this obscure choir member from the parish of Our Lady of Lourdes in Blackburn in the West Lothian district of Scotland all the more remarkable is that she was born with a slight brain damage and was bullied as a child. Known as Susie Simple, she lived alone with her cat after caring for her late mother.

The audition was done in January and the show was finally screened on television on the eve of Easter. The following day, she received a standing ovation at her parish’s Easter Sunday Mass. It was a redemption of sorts and a new life beckoned.

The stunned expressions in the audition hall had as much to do with her God-given talent — her obviously angelic voice — as well as the fact that her image and persona defied all conventional wisdom in the rough-and-tumble world of show business: that to succeed, you have to be young, smart, attractive and be given the right breaks at the right age. A person with learning difficulties would never make it or so everyone had thought.

How silly we are to accept such superficialities without looking deeper. Susan Boyle has turned conventional wisdom upside down. Much like another humble obscure village maiden did when she proclaimed the verses of the Magnificat, two millennia ago.