"We walked 30 miles to hear you today but arrived only at the very end. We waited in the hope of offering our respects to you before returning to our village."

The speakers were a dust-streaked couple in crumpled sari and dhoti in remote Ayalur in Tamil Nadu's Thanjavur district - where Carnatic vocalist M.S. Subbulakshmi had given a concert as the finale of a week-long temple festival. Her name had drawn from villages miles around, thousands who were at that time returning with no thought or word beyond the exhilaration her vocal music had wrought.

Drained by the two-and-a-half hour performance and passage through the adulation of the packed crowds, the (then) 70-year-old musician had no thought but of rest during the early journey of the next day. But she would not, could not, send the couple away disappointed. "Let us sing at least one song for them." The younger accompanist to whom she said this asked, "Do you know it is midnight now?" With a smile MS began to sing with the same earnestness and attention she had shown earlier on the stage. For her, music was ever a matter of reverence.

Another instance illustrates her appeal to the cognoscenti: It was with more than the usual trepidation that M.S. Subbulakshmi faced a distinguished audience of needle-sharp rasikas and fellow musicians at the Music Academy in Madras one evening in the 1950s. She was about to present a pallavi in Raga Begada, "Kailasapate, pasupate, umapate, namostute," across the Adi tala cycle. This was a challenge to her virtuosity in rhythm-charged ragam-tanam-pallavi techniques. Star-singer though she already was, she was not particularly known for pallavi pyrotechnics. What followed was no different from the typical Subbulakshmi concert - thunderous applause greeted her at every stage of the unfolding.