MUMBAI: Our beloved Mamata Didi thought it would give the first world tough competition if she put up a Little Ben in the middle of Rajarhat and introduced a wax museum. That’s the secret to development, right? Needless to mention these are all original ideas at par with our rich Indian culture and don’t even dare question the authenticity because Didi has her ways of convincing people. Bicycles and biriyani packets these days can make fairytales and make-beliefs real for example if you think you are the chief minister, just hand out the above requisites and viola!

Kolkata has undergone a complete makeover with unreturned borrowed money in hideous attempts to resemble London with no rhyme or reason at all. The ever so ruling party before even coming into power made sure the ‘Cultural Capital’ was not plagued with industrialization by keeping TATA far away from the West Bengal vicinity thus handing out more time to the youth to make perfect concentric smoke rings.

However one of the biggest industrial hubs in our country, Bangalore, has decided to show some love to our rich musical roots by preserving what’s left of it along with all the recent developments in the artform. “As a musician, I react very emotionally to music, and I want people to experience that magic,” told project director Manasi Prasad, a young Carnatic vocalist with a dual background in management to a leading daily.

This musuem located in South Bangalore will not follow the conventional museum guidelines. Unlike most museums, the Indian Musical Experience is a dynamic project which will not only showcase the country’s heritage but has also paved avenues for indie music to be showcased. An amalgamation of technology and music in India is the targeted concept of the IME.

Apart from Virasat-e-Khalsa in Punjab which has had a footfall of 75 lakhs in the last five years, there aren’t many museums out of the 150 all over the country that are vistor-friendly or interactive.

Although IME will have a different approach from the rest of these museums given the innovators are Gallagher and Associates, a design firm whose projects include the Grammy museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. One interesting thing about the museum is that it will offer musical rickshaw rides to the visitors. These musical three-wheelers are mostly going to play contemporary indie music and will kick start the journey through the museum. This particularly grabs attention because the starting point of the concept is modern indie music which has world influences and slowly trickles back to temple music and purer Indian genres.

The idea of the museum spurred when a private developer, Brigade Group, fulfilled a requirement to hand over a two-acre parcel of land for a “civic amenity” after conceiving the sprawling Brigade Millennium complex of apartments in JP Nagar. The majority of people in the neighbourhood wanted a facility devoted to music.

Initially, there weren’t many options. A music school at the most or a maze of performance venues. Then, in 2009, during a business trip to Seattle, Brigade chairman MR Jaishankar visited what was then called the Experience Music Project (Museum Of Pop Culture). This cemented the idea of creating IME. The Bangalore museum’s building designed by Architecture Paradigm follows the curves of the existing jamun and mango trees on the plot. The curved façade symbolises the gradual expansion of Indian music, like a flowing raga. The flooring, made of Kota stone from Rajasthan, is hard enough to withstand large footfalls.

What intrigued Jaishankar about the Museum Of Pop Culture was not so much the Hendrix and Nirvana Mementos, but the technology that got young music fans swarming to the place. They could play the guitar before a screaming crowd projected on a huge screen or record a song in the studio. Jaishankar saw huge business potential in introducing the same concept here in India.

Like any other idea, this one had its set of shortcomings too. Firstly it is impossible to fit in a plethora of equally rich genres and artists in a museum that spans three floors and 20,000 square feet of exhibition space. To defuse any struggle between north and south, the committee agreed to give equal space to Hindustani and Carnatic. Regional forms were given just 60 slots. It’s a heartbreaker that all of our rich roots can’t be put together but it is pretty difficult to not acknowledge the diverse population which might stand as a hindrance in the path of the free functioning of this museum. The head of the content committee, Papu Venugopala Rao told the daily, “We had to be very merciless. We had to be ruthless.”

He added, “We did not want to focus on living artists unless they are very popular. It will create unnecessary problems.”

The national anthem and film music obviously was subject to special preference whereas indie bands got cut down to Indian Ocean and the Raghu Dixit project owing to their classical roots.

Now the biggest issue that any existing entity faces is financial constraints. Brigade contributed 15 crores from the CSR but that was not even half of the gargantuan 42 crores. The central government agreed to provide Rs 5 crore, the state government gave Rs 2 crore and the State Bank of India contributed another 2 crores. Today, the team is still trying to raise Rs 8 to 10 crore from corporate donors and the public alike.