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Last weekend, my daughters were in New York to spend Thanksgiving weekend with various family members.
They photographed their occasional raids in the biting cold – it was the coldest Thanksgiving in New York since 1901 – including a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is one of the largest museums in the world, after the Louvre in Paris.
In adolescence, I visited often: the entrance was free and there were many girls as beautiful as the subjects of Renaissance paintings.
I've also had better education than any class I could have attended, even though I attended well-known institutions.
I was happy for my daughters.
Delhi has museums but they are not too exciting. The museum of modern art is pedestrian – as if a local auntyji had decided to singer Picasso.
Ordinary people who are really motivated plan a morning or an afternoon around the National Museum of India, which presents interesting historical artifacts that escaped the world's forerunners of antiquities (to learn more about this scourge, read The Idol Thief, a book on the real crime of S Vijay Kumar) After this visit, the national museum is forgotten for one or two decades.
The Ministry of Culture or the Delhi government could remedy this by developing and peddling a circuit of museums in the capital, but they disagree with each other because of a relentless political rivalry.
Similarly is the music scene. When I arrived in Delhi in late 1986, Mandi House's central roundabout, with its galleries and auditoriums, was a place where it was safe to find a musical or theatrical show to attend.
Concerts are held in winter at Nehru Park or the Garden of the Five Senses near Saket, where Maestro Carnatic TM Krishna was recently invited by the Delhi government to perform in front of a crowded audience after airport authorities (led by the central government). he disavowed it because of his antipathy towards majorityism.
However, the musical price is lean and for the average citizen, invisible. Worse is the scene of Western classical music. I'm listening to the most Western classical music possible on YouTube or on Amazon Prime.
YouTube shows you how many world capitals have philharmonic orchestras: besides American cities and European capitals, East Asian capitals have their own orchestra conductors and concert halls.
Dubai has an opera. Sydney has an opera, although Australia is not famous for its classical music or musicians. Indeed, many of the best modern pianists come from East Asia, which is important for stupid pseudo-nationalists who think that the appreciation of Western art is slave or non-patriotic.
I started learning piano in May, a month before my 54th birthday. In April, an illness kept me at home, during which I watched Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, and decided to immerse myself in Western classical music.
I had no training or aptitude, but I now cherish my time at the piano, my refuge from the world. Being a concert pianist is part of my fantasies of waking dream, but I realize coldly that Delhi will never have an orchestra.
The children of the music school seem to be sent by their middle-class parents who do not expect that they become musicians, but slot machines. Delhi does not have any arts patron to dream of an orchestra.
Forgetting to have an orchestra, it is unlikely that Delhi invites a Western orchestra conductor and orchestra to perform as they have neither facilities nor, I shamelessly confess, class .
This must be one of the advantages of living in Dubai compared to Delhi: you have the opportunity to immerse yourself in the classical arts.
The other problem with the appreciation of art in the national capital of India is that the places are located in the center of Delhi, which has become again a collection of villages.
The traffic is frustrating to the point of crying; in summer it is too hot and in winter it is too polluted to travel; if you are traveling for work, this is not a family visit, so you are not planning to visit a museum, etc. And as the daily needs of each are locally available, no one is motivated to leave their localities one afternoon.
It is therefore not surprising that Delhi is such a philistine place that it is unbearable.
The art is a bridge to the unknown, a starting point towards the infinite possibilities of the mind and the universe. If politics on a global scale has become more nativist, then art is eternal, transcendental and global.
More than ever, we all need art as an antidote to the times in which the planet descended. The character of a city is, after all, defined by its access to the art.
Aditya Sinha is a journalist based in India and author, more recently, of
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