Galleria d´arteBirla Science Museum

di 100 punti
basato su 1 opinioni
# 3 dell' 3 Museo/Mostra/Galleria d´arte a Hyderabad

Opinione dettagliata di koshkha

koshkha(46)
Northampton, Regno Unito

97%

bene

We arrived at the Birla Science Museum fresh from visiting the Birla Mandir temple nearby. It was about 10 am and the place was still closed so we parked up and bought soft drinks from the food stand inside the gates whilst I driver wandered off to get some tea with the other taxi drivers. We couldn't get in until 10.30 and whilst we waited a small army of neatly dressed primary school children marched up, two abreast to wait with us. The teachers were going crazy trying to control them and you could sense to excitement amongst the little ones. We wondered why they would be so excited about a museum but once inside it became apparent that this place had been built with the idea of inspiring young minds.

You can buy a ticket for the Science Museum or the Planetarium or both. We just took the Science Museum. I'm not sure why but every time I'm presented with the prospect of a planetarium I seem to wriggle away from it.

The museum is part of the B.M.Birla Science Centre which seems to have institutes and colleges all over the country. Science has no doubt been important to the growth of the businesses of the Industrialist Birla family. Religion likewise - hence their habit of building temples. And I suspect that the reason for including a planetarium is rather more about astrology and fortune telling than about good hard 'Large Hadron Collider - Birth of the Universe' style science.

We stood back to let the kids head in first and they made straight for the ground floor and began creating an incredible racket. The guards insisted that we should go downstairs first and like obedient tourists (who wanted to avoid small children) we went along with their request. The Birla Science Museum basement just didn't seem to fit with its claim to be a science museum. It was more like a place for the random storage for the bits and bobs of the Birla family. As we strolled around the ceramics, glass and nick-nacks collection we were by turns stunned by some fabulous pieces we'd love to have taken home and horrified by how ridiculously ugly and naff some of it was. The first room kicked off with some Royal Worcester that my husband (a ceramics boffin) identified as shockingly expensive stuff , followed by some gorgeous Daum and Baccarat glass, the latter sharing a case with some disgusting Swarowski tat. I'm not a fan of Royal Doulton ladies but I suspect Mrs Birla might have once made the mistake of cooing over one and getting dozens every year forever after. I've never seen so much kitsch in one place. A lot of money had been spent on some very nice cranberry glass, some very soppy emotional Lladro pieces and some weird oriental vases. There was a life sized pink flamingo made out of rose quartz and a mountain of what hubby classified as 'Sunday Supplement Crp that you wouldn't give houseroom to'. We had a giggle at the mislabelled Royal Worcester figure of 'Prince' Ann on a horse.

Also in the basement was a collection of fine Hindu gods and carvings as well as lots of archaeological finds from around the state of Andra Pradesh. Miniature paintings were of a great quality and shared a room with a collection of manuscripts, batiks, metal-decorated pictures from Tanjore and displays of arms and armour. You'll no doubt have noticed, not a lot of science so far.

We headed up stairs and the kids were still screaming around the ground floor so we kept going to the next level. Here we found some seriously weird dioramas. Well to be fair, I find the whole idea of dioramas intrinsically weird and have only ever come across them once before at a museum in Amritsar. I had to look it up and found this definition on thefreedictionary.com - "A three-dimensional miniature or life-size scene in which figures, stuffed wildlife, or other objects are arranged in a naturalistic setting against a painted background.

Well yes, that's pretty much what a diorama is. I forget what one of them was though a little voice in my head is saying there were penguins but I might be deluding myself. The one I do recall - because I was fascinated enough to write it in my note book - was a submerged city called Dwarka which had gone missing in 1500 BC and come to light in the 1970s. So India appears to have had its own Atlantis. I would have liked to have known more but we were being followed so closely by an annoying curator chappie that we just couldn't take the risk of opening up a conversation that might go on for a very long time. I've debated this 'close-surveillance' behaviour of museum staff in India with my husband and we can't decide whether they fear we're going to steal something, think they should be on hand to answer any possible question or are desperate for a tip. Whatever it is, it's exceptionally off-putting.

We were feeling brave so we headed back to the ground floor to find out what the kids were up to. There was a very large room set out with dozens of excellent exhibits based around basic physics experiments. Almost all of these were interactive exhibits and the noise had been due to the kids pulling, pushing, turning and waving things around. Now that I saw what was on offer, I wasn't surprised at how loud it had been. The kids were really getting turned on to science by the sheer lack of 'do not touch' signs and the freedom to play with everything. We skirted round the edge keeping away from the more boisterous groups and prodded and poked the displays like big kids. Quite a few would probably have been banned in a European museum for health and safety reasons - sadly that's why India is now producing great engineers and scientists whilst the Western world is churning out kids who can play computer games.

The final attraction of our visit was upstairs and out of the main building and was the 'Dinosaurium'. Given a large room of its own, I can't claim this was a stunning exhibit because I've spent a lot of time in fantastic natural history museums. However, in amongst the pictures, a few bones and rather dusty rocks, they do have a fabulous skeleton of a local boy - a dinosaur by the name of Kotasaurus who was looking pretty good for a 160 million year old.

Entrance to the Birla Science Museum is a mere 10 Rp - about 15p in English money, 25 cents in American. It's not the best or the fanciest science museum but it does have a gentle quirky charm and it's well worth a visit. The gardens are also rather nice. It's worth noting that cameras are not allowed inside at all. They wouldn't want you stealing images of those dioramas after all!

Birla Science Museum7