Music files

His most recent offering has been a film,The Poetry of Driftwood,on driftwood artist Mohammed Hanif from Lakshwadeep. The 26-minute film was released last month in Delhi.

In all,Jha has authored 17 books in Hindi on subjects ranging from music to preparatory material for IAS aspirants. He took to making films only recently after his friend,tabla maestro Nawab Khan,was killed in Afghanistan,where he was part of a music delegation in Kabul. The documentary titled,Aman Ka Farishta,was a collection on Nawab Khan. “I knew him very well since I was a teenager. So I decided to make a film to preserve his legacy and to tell people that even modest people deserved to be remembered,” says the 39-year-old IAS officer. He followed up his film on Nawab Khan with a film on the tanpura in Tanpura—Shahad Ka Tumba. The film traced the origins of the instrument to the African gourd.

A former journalist for a Hindi publication in Patna and a post-graduate in Hindi from JNU,Jha was hoping to resume his work as a journalist when he came to Delhi,but his wife had other plans for him. “Since I was writing books for IAS aspirants,my wife asked me to appear for the IAS. I reluctantly agreed so that we could be in the same city,” says Jha,who eventually joined the Indian Civil Accounts Service,although he never had a penchant for numbers. But he found ways to overcome his fear of numbers by introducing innovative procedures. So he is credited with creating a database that lists all Indian missions abroad and helps in keeping a track of all the daily transactions. “Earlier there were reams of paper which were lying around for auditing the bank accounts of our Indian missions. Now,this system has made the task much quite convenient,” he explains.

At his home in Delhi,Jha has over 2,000 rare recordings from Indian classical musicians and on any given Sunday can be seen strolling through Darya Ganj,bargaining with music shops for a rare recording. For now,he is working on documentaries on Pakistani classical vocalists,Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and Nazakat Ali Khan.

“They are an important part of classical music traditions because they parted ways in 1974. I was first contemplating a book,but now I will make two documentaries on their life and style of singing,” he says.