 Spanish settlers finished their journey across the American Plains. They stopped about 17 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and they named their camp after the Queen of the Angels that had guided them across the continent. They named the surrounding districts after their patron saints, Monica and Barbara, in the embrace of San Diego to the south and San Francisco to the north. And in the center of the city that became Los Angeles, they named attractive land after the patron saint of wanderers as they had been, San Julian. San Julian Street today is the epicenter of the homeless capital of the United States known as Skid Row. It is a place where journeys, where hope and dreams has taken a wrong turn and lives have ended up forgotten and shattered. Of the people living on Skid Row, two-thirds are mentally ill or disabled. A large percentage are veterans of American wars. This is a place where words fail, because words and the empty promises they carry cannot be trusted. Words of sympathy, of compassion, of pity, and sometimes even of counseling come with judgment. But it has been in playing for this audience, for playing for the homeless and mentally ill on Skid Row, has taught me a deeper purpose of why I play music. It has been this audience that has showed me that music can speak where words fail. My mother always describes the relationship between a musician and his instrument as a kind of sadhana devoted, adoring worship. And the amazing performers we've seen here this week, Charles Small and my brothers from Talavya, we understand this, the thousands of hours of lessons with a devoted guru, a devoted teacher, and the tens of thousands of hours alone in a room with our instrument, before we can even think about making a note of music. And I would always dream of playing the pieces of music that my teacher said I wasn't yet ready for, to play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, to play the Ring Cycle by Wagner, or one day to play in a symphony orchestra. And with my wild dreams anchored by my parents' very typically dogged Bengali determination, all of these dreams came true. I found myself studying at the Juilliard School in Manhattan when I was seven, playing my debut with Zubin Mehta and Tel Aviv with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra when I was 11, playing the Mendelssohn Concerto. And in the middle of this solo career, performing all over Europe and America, but one of my most cherished memories was coming to India for the first time, performing in Bangalore and Mumbai and in my parents' home city of Kolkata. And much more than being awestruck by seeing the roots of my culture and heritage for the first time, what stayed with me was the reaction from these audiences. I had never before seen people so moved, moved to sobbing tears by any type of music, much less a 12-year-old Bengali kid playing Mozart. I never knew that people could be so moved by music, that music would have this kind of impact on people and it led me to question, to try to understand what the role of music was, what the power of music was on our lives. And I think that that question itself sparked in me a very fortuitous and unexpected journey, but one that has brought me back after 13 years to this stage, into the very heart of my motherland to be able to speak before you today. But my violin playing was not always so warmly received. When I returned home from my tour in India, I was shocked to find that I had been failed in sixth grade, because I had missed my winter exams. Now, as much as my parents supported my brother and myself playing classical music, I was still growing up in an Indian household. So the idea of flunking sixth grade was simply not an option. So my mother pulled me out of the school district and she homeschooled me herself. And a few months later the school district showed up, this time with a court order and a social worker threatening to take my brother and myself away from my parents into foster care if we didn't go back to school. And so my mother decided that the only way I could continue properly studying the violin and to get a real education was to go to college. And so after a couple months of comprehensive exams and many battles with the school district, I started my undergraduate degree when I was 13 at a small school in upstate New York. And one of the first courses I took was a course in introductory chemistry and my professor gave me a series of articles on the effects of music on the brain. And immediately I fell in love with neuroscience. I also fell in love with medicine, with the stories of doctors like Paul Farmer and Rick Hoads and Dr. Prakash Amte. These kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or to Ethiopia to work with children with spinal tuberculosis or AIDS patients with TB and very disfiguring cancers. I wanted to become that kind of doctor who healed with his hands, the doctor who worked in the field at Red Cross, that doctor without borders. And I pursued this new enlightened language of my mind, this new passion for neuroscience all the way up to landing a research internship studying Parkinson's disease at the Harvard Medical School. But all throughout this time I felt as if I was neglecting a deeper language. I felt as if I had abandoned my second mother tongue, as if I had abandoned my violin. So after convincing my parents to let me spend two more years studying music, I decided to shoot for the impossible. And I took an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic, directed now by the brilliant young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel. It was my first audition and after three grueling days of playing from behind the screen, I had landed my dream job in Hollywood. I was 19. And here I was. I was living this California dream and I was surrounded by this family of amazing musicians, these mentors that became my new home. But in 2008 I met another amazing musician who like myself had studied at the Juilliard School. But Nathaniel Ayers suffered a series of manic episodes in his early 20s, later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia and spent nearly the next 30 years of his life living homeless in places like Skid Row. In fact, even though he is no longer homeless, Nathaniel still lives on San Julian Street. His story has become a beacon for mental health and homelessness advocacy throughout the United States, but it was Nathaniel who introduced me to the world of Skid Row. I became his violin teacher. I told him that wherever he had his violin, wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him. And so we started at my home, the beautiful stainless steel Frank Gary Walt Disney Concert Hall. And one day on my 22nd birthday, I found myself playing at Nathaniel's home on Skid Row on San Julian Street in a trash littered courtyard in the LA Men's Project, just six feet away from the squalor and horrors of Skid Row separated by rusting metal bars topped with barbed wire. And here, in this place, the music of Beethoven Bach, Mozart Revelle, these composers that we keep in the concert hall, this music had as much meaning here as it did in the concert hall because now this music was about communication. It was a communication of a message that went deeper than words, that didn't need words and came from my heart and registered in a very deep place within Nathaniel's soul and his psyche. Nathaniel showed me that music was the bridge that brought my world and his world together. There's a beautiful quote by the German composer Robert Schumann, who himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in an asylum. Schumann said, to send light into the darkness of men's hearts, such is the duty of the artist. And again and again I witnessed how music brought Nathaniel back from his very darkest moments for what to me seemed like the very brink of a manic episode. And so earlier this year, I founded an organization called the Street Symphony, which is an ensemble of musicians like myself who bring the light and joy of music into the very darkest places, to the communities without access to the kind of music that we make, to the homeless and mentally ill living on Skid Row, to veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, to children with Down syndrome and autism, and most recently to the incarcerated. And what we find at the first level is that the Street Symphony is a musical service through which we the musicians are a conduit to deliver the tremendous beneficial powers of music on the brain to the communities that would never have any access to it but deserve and need that aspect of the arts the most. But deeper than that, the Street Symphony is a human service because we show these audiences that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful, that they are not forgotten by the world and that they carry that beauty within themselves and the spark of that beauty, the spark of that divinity blossoms into hope. And that is the first thing that we must instill within the hearts of these people if we are even to begin the discussion on eradicating the stigma associated with mental health and homelessness. At the end of September, I drove up to the Patton State Mental Hospital in San Bernardino. And for all intents and purposes, Patton is a prison for the criminally insane. There's two compounds, one for long-term residents and one for more acute short-term residents, many of whom are found unfit to stand trial. And I performed at both of these compounds as part of the Street Symphony. And after my performance in the long-term compound, a gentleman walked up to me, an inmate, and he asked me if I knew any songs that he knew, African-American spirituals or any movie soundtracks, which is why now I'm learning the Titanic theme song in my spare time. But we had a beautiful conversation that only two musicians could have, two musicians who were crazy about music. And then without warning, he started to sing in this beautiful, booming, baritone voice. He sung this song, Jesus on the Main Line. It's a great song. The lyrics are amazing. Jesus is on the Main Line. Call him up and tell him what you want. That line ain't never busy. If you're feeling down and out, tell him what you want. If you want his kingdom, tell him what you want. If you're sick and you want to get well, tell him what you want. A song about hope, about recovery, about redemption, sung by an incarcerated man in the middle of a mental hospital. And it was the purest gift I have ever received in my life because it came with no expectation. I got an email from a therapist at Pat and a few days later saying that they had never before seen their residents sit together so calmly, so lucidly in a room and listen to music. For many of them, it was the first time they had ever heard of violin live. They said to me that for the next two days, the patients didn't stop talking about the concert and that none of them who attended needed medication to sedate themselves. They said that they had never seen the patients walk up to anyone, walk up to any visitor, so broad-shouldered, smiling and confident, shaking my hand and thanking me for coming to visit them. At the end of my performance in the second compound, a woman walked up to me and she had tears in her eyes and she said that she had trained as a classical pianist in Armenia, but had come to the United States and ended up at Patton. And for a second, I wondered if her story was like Nathaniel's but was simply one that was never told, that was forgotten by the world. And she said to me, you know, Bach is my universe and Beethoven is the soul of the world. And at that moment, I totally understood her. At that moment, we were united, at one in the joy of music, united in Bach's universe and in Beethoven's soul. Thank you.