Meet IAS officer who topped UPSC exam with AIR 1, has worked in Bollywood as...

Civil services and Bollywood is a rare mix despite India boasting some extremely talented and multi-faceted bureaucrats. There are the stories of Abhishek Singh, who left IAS officer job to become an actor, and HS Keerthana, who went from an actor to an IAS officer. But there’s also an IAS officer who has worked as a playback singer in Bollywood. The name of this senior IAS officer, who is also 1994 UPSC topper, is Srivatsa Krishna.

Born in Delhi, Srivatsa had two dreams from childhood, the first he accomplished by becoming an IAS officer in his third attempt. The second was to have a singing career, a dream which he seemingly had given up when he did not take up the offer to sing in a Raj Kapoor film. Srivatsa gave up on an offer by music director Ravindra Jain to sing in 'Prem Rog' as his father wanted him to first complete his studies.

The Delhi-born IAS officer was an ace student and received full scholarships to study computer science in prestigious US institutes like Stanford University and Yale. However, he gave them up to become an IAS officer as per his father’s last wish. He is an alumnus of University of Delhi’s Shri Ram College of Commerce, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Oxford University. He holds a PhD from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. He is also the first IAS officer in history to earn an MBA from Harvard.

Srivatsa Krishna is the voice behind the ‘Vishnu Sahasranamam Mantra’ in famous Bollywood director Dibakar Banerjee’s film ‘Shanghai’. The IAS officer and the filmmaker were in the same college where they were rival debaters. The opportunity to lend his voice to Bollywood came when they both had a chance meeting in a cafe. According to IMDB, Srivatsa Krishna was auditioned by legendary Oscar-winning musician AR Rahman for a future production.