Susan Boyle doing her magic. Courtesy of YouTube.com

I suppose everyone loves the story of the underdog which is why the story of Susan Boyle, the 47-year-old Scottish virgin-turn-singing sensation, has captured the imagination of so many.

When I watched her video on YouTube two nights ago, it was at 2.7 million views. This morning, a report in the Los Angeles Times said “more than 13 million YouTube views later, Hollywood agents and talk-show bookers are jostling for a few minutes with Susan Boyle, a stocky, beetle-browed woman who would not ordinarily rate a second glance on the street”.

Within days of her appearing before the judges on Britain’s Got Talent, the spinster who lives with her cats in a cottage in a cluster of villages in Scotland and never been kissed has become a household name in a classic case of viral video.

I felt positively behind the times when I asked my niece about it and she said, “Oh, her, she’s all over the Internet.”

The story of Susan Boyle resonates on several levels, the main one being, we should not judge a book by its cover.

When she came out, looking as unlikely a superstar as Bart Simpson for the title of Class Genius, you could see the judges, along with me and everyone else, had put her in a box – plain, past-sell-by-date, overweight, frumpy, spinster/virgin, burdened with delusions of grandeur.

No chance, was the collective, unspoken thought.

You could see the judges wincing when she said she wanted to be like Elaine Page and when she stated her age, and the audience groaned, she ground her ample hips and blurted: "And that's just one side of me!" Which led the judges to wince even more.

Then she opened her mouth to sing and jaws dropped.

And with that, the awakening to the fact that we have all been so brainwashed to equate looks with talent that we were so quick to dismiss a woman based on that.

Shame on us. We judged Susan Boyle by her looks, thought her a female Shrek and she turned out to be a Princess.

Said a piece in the Guardian, "It wasn't singer Susan Boyle who was ugly on 'Britain's Got Talent' so much as our reaction to her.”

Emailed a friend of mine when I shared the video with him, “It is great to see that in a world where usually anybody with a less perfect body than Madonna at 50, or the growing rows of cute but shallow girls celebrating their bodies in questionable settings and the 'Music’ if the term is still justifiable, taking a back seat, a 47-year-old woman has a gift inside her that shakes the foundations of shallowness and touches all with true emotion.”

Susan Boyle did more than prove her talent that night, she made us question ourselves.

To hear Susan Boyle's extraordinary voice watch the YouTube video: Britain's Got Talent 2009-Susan Boyle