The Indian voice resonating in Belgium
A classroom in Kerala worked it out when Anna Jacob was eleven. It took Antwerp before she believed them.
Anna Jacob
Belgium · 2 min read
From India to Belgium, music has become a bridge between cultures for a young Indian singer who continues to carry her love for music wherever she goes. Performing Indian songs on Belgian streets and stages, she is creating her own space in a new country. Her journey is not just about singing, but about keeping her roots alive while finding her voice on an international platform.
She was eleven, and the audience was her classmates. She sang one song.
What she remembers is not the song. It is the sound that came afterwards — the first real applause of her life — and the fact that a room full of children had just settled something about her that she had not settled herself. She can sing. That was the verdict, and it held.
It was also the first time in my life that I heard a loud round of applause and it’s a feeling I’ll never forget
Everyone but home
Kerala first, and a childhood spent singing where nobody had asked her to.
The believing, when it came, came from college — classmates and seniors under no obligation to encourage her, who did it loudly enough that she started to believe it herself. Ask Anna what shaped her and she does not name a teacher, a competition or a lucky break. She names people.
I have been passionate about singing since childhood but never got any support from family.
Architect by profession, Singer by passion
Balancing a career in architecture with her passion for music, she continues to pursue both worlds side by side. But behind the balance is a bigger dream: to one day leave the drafting table behind and become a full-time musician, turning her passion into her profession.
A stage is where I truly belong, it's where I feel most like myself and the happiest.
The other kind of family
There is a symmetry in Anna's story that she never points at. The house she grew up in did not back the singing. The people she found here do.
She has no elaborate way of putting it. It does not need one.
The community I have here is like family like friends.
Her own song
Ask what she is proudest of and it is not a stage or a crowd. It is a song — “Creating my first ever original song” — the first one that did not exist until she wrote it. At eleven she sang somebody else's words to a room that had not asked. Now she writes her own.
What comes next is a bigger room: a live Indian music concert with her band, her own compositions in the set, and an audience she wants on its feet rather than in its seats. Line that up against a classroom in Kerala and it is the same event at a different scale. She is open to bookings.
Photos: Joel Vitoria
Work with Anna
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