India, May 12 -- It was January 2013. I had just resigned a month ago from the Indian Foreign Service and left Bhutan, where I was the Ambassador, to join politics under Nitish Kumar. He had appointed me his advisor and asked me to take a special interest in reviving and preserving Bihar's great cultural heritage.

As part of this process, we organised the first Bihar Literary Festival in March 2013. Partnering with the government was the Navras School of Performing Arts, run by the dynamic husband-wife duo of Anvita and Dr Ajit Pradhan. Ajit is a man of many parts. A top-notch cardiac surgeon by profession, who has his own hospital in Patna, he is also passionately interested in all the arts, especially classical music and Urdu poetry. H...