Christmas is the season of choirs! Choirs, whose melodious voices bring tears of joy into our eyes!

Such melodious uniting of voices is produced through harmony. And this Christmas, as you listen to harmony, realise that harmony happens when all the voices in a choir, be they ten or a hundred, blend together to produce a beautiful chord, that harmony cannot happen when one voice tries to overpower another. Harmony is also lost when you have a soundman who doesn't know music and gives the alto part more sound than the sopranos or tenors more volume than the basses.

Harmony comes through absolute balance.

Balance, more often than not, starts right from the source. The singers themselves have to see that they sing with their mouths and listen with their ears. If they shut their ears, which I've seen many choir members do, they have cut off adjusting to others and sing only for themselves.

Harmonious singing requires both mouths and ears to be open together.

From such choral voices, music will flow that will move audiences into a heavenly state of joy and bliss.

Have you ever thought, as you hear choirs this Christmas season, that this is the way we are supposed to live as a nation? Suddenly, instead of harmony in the country, we hear shouting; one voice, or one party, or one religious thought trying to out-drown another.

Even as we may sometimes leave a hall disgusted with the music produced, people all over the world are looking at us, disappointed by the chaotic sounds that are coming out.

We were a nation that taught the world non-violence, and it is time, like a failed choir, we come back to the rehearsal hall and start learning our music again.

We, like members of a successful choir, need to produce in ourselves, a spirit of adjustment and balance. As a family, a society, and nation, and as people of the world, we should start using our lives to speak out even as we listen to what others around us are trying to express.

Just imagine the beauty of living our lives like choristers: softening our voices so others can be heard, listening to the voices of other parts so that together, we blend to form a chord.

Imagine looking up at the Conductor, watching His peaceful expressions so we can express ourselves the way He does.

Imagine getting our notes from the music score, our Constitution!

Listen to choirs this Christmas season, but even as you do, take back with you a deeper lesson than the words the songwriters wrote, realising that choral harmony could be a wonderful way to live as a nation, attuned, adjusted and accommodating one another.

And then, just imagine, what a rapturous, rhapsody of harmonious choral music we Indians will produce together...!