Not many are aware that even while she was trying to secure India's interests, Rao tried to continue to hone skills of a completely different kind: singing and playing a guitar.
Till her retirement, and even in her post-retirement stint as India's Ambassador to the US, former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao was known as a soft-spoken but firm diplomat.
Not many are aware that even while she was trying to secure India's interests, Rao tried to continue to hone skills of a completely different kind: singing and playing a guitar.
However, her rise in the IFS circles also meant that time became the biggest constraint in her development as a singer. But, after completing her term as India's Ambassador in the US in late 2013, Rao returned to her singing.
Come December and Rao will become possibly the first senior diplomat to come out with a commercial album of songs sung by her — some of the songs in the album have also been written and composed by her.
Over the past year, Rao has also been singing in a series of concerts, accompanied by well known Sri Lankan concert pianist Soundarie David Rodrigo. Dubbed Beyond Boundaries, she has performed in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Lucknow, with one coming up in Delhi.
When in Delhi, she's an eager participant at the musical soirees.
These soiress involve several former diplomats and civil servants, including former chief election commissioner SY Quraishi and former Foreign Secretary and National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon.
"It's a kind of band we have of the services — with me on the keyboard and guitar, Shiv Shankar Menon singing and playing the rhythm guitar, and Madhukar Gupta, former Union Home Secretary, on percussion," Qureishi told DNA.
"I have been singing ever since I was a little girl," said Rao. "I grew up listening to a lot of Western music, primarily, because that was what was mostly heard in Ooty where I grew up. I wasn't much exposed to Hindi music. At 15, I started playing the guitar. Those days, we were hooked to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and the like. I took my guitar along with me to Mussoorie for the civil services training. But music was a side thing, and when I was around 25, with work and other responsibilities, I gave it up," Rao told DNA.
But it was in Sri Lanka, where Rao was posted as Indian high commissioner from 2004 to 2006, that she really sharpened her skills. "Sri Lanka has a culture of Western music and I found a little circle of music oriented friends.
This is here I met Rodrigo. For me, music was a way of building bridges between countries, of taking Indian music around the world." In the spirit of "building bridges", Rao's rendition of 'Vaishnava Jana', Mahatma Gandhi's favourite bhajan, is accompanied by a Sri Lankan choir.
But it's musical "preferences" rather than her public persona that seems to have guided Rao's eclectic choice of songs for the album. Among them are operatic songs, English folk songs, pieces of musical theatre and a quaint song called 'Ah Tiewlarun', written by an American lyricist Max Exner about a magical flower called Tiewlarun that grows only in the mountains of Meghalaya.
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