New Delhi: Senior Punjab civil servant and a 1997-batch IAS officer Rakhee Gupta has released a devotional music video on YouTube.
“This was just part of my passion and hobby. Singing has long been a childhood hobby of mine. I performed in school choirs and family gatherings all the time,” Gupta told ThePrint.
Gupta, 47, is currently serving as the resident commissioner of Punjab in New Delhi. She had served as a joint secretary between 2015 and 2016 in the Ministry of Home Affairs. An alumna of Lady Shri Ram College and the Delhi School of Economics, she completed her Master of Philosophy from the National Defence College in 2017.
In 2012, she was conferred the Stree Shakti Puraskar, an annual award given by the Ministry of Women and Child Development “for encouraging women to start working in mainstream and public sector offices”.
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Video rakes up over 37,000 views
The four-and-a-half-minute-long music video, uploaded by the Times Music Group Sunday, is a bhajan (devotional song) about Lord Krishna and Radha. The video has received over 37,000 views on YouTube so far.
Titled ‘Main Toh Ratungi Radha Naam’, the song was composed by Gaurav Dev and Kartik Dev. The description in the video says the song is dedicated to Gupta’s mother.
The video was shot in Uttar Pradesh’s Mathura and Vrindavan, and features green landscapes as well as pilgrimage sites.
Gupta said the project was in the pipeline with Times Music Group since late last year but due to the pandemic, the date of release was postponed. “During the lockdown, I was busy coordinating bringing back NRIs from abroad (as well as) when a lot of migrants left for their villages,” she told ThePrint.
Earlier in April, Gupta had written a poem called ‘This Too Shall Pass‘ and posted it on Twitter. The poem addressed the hardships during Covid-19.
An attempt at summing the present Covid times in print today.@kbssidhu1961 @IASassociation @capt_amarinder @CMOPb @neelamrudy @SrBachchan @anurradhaprasad @PunjabPoliceInd @HMOIndia @narendramodi @sumbly @KapilKumria pic.twitter.com/A8CuetNUDp
— Rakhee Gupta IAS (@rakheeguptaias) April 12, 2020