This weekend, I decided to try out a Chennai attraction I've been saving for a rainy day - the Government Museum. Now I'd heard it wasn't exactly the Tate Modern, but thought I would go along and see for myself. The museum itself like much of Chennai is an imposing building which must have been lovely in its day, but has been left to slowly crumble away. There are several buildings, one housing a children's museum (presumably a museum for children rather than a museum containing children...), one with rather dubious art, one with a rather random collection of exhibitions about subjects as diverse as printing, dyeing, paper making, Landrovers and bits of machinery the relevance of which was lost on me. However the tour de force of the place was the Natural History section. Think the NatHist museum in London circa 1950, having had no upkeep ever since. Pickled snakes and frogs. Old bones with no labels. Dark dingy cabinets with Victorian-style lettering announcing the exhibits and housing a veritable chamber of horrors - stuffed creatures of every description, their glass eyes skewiff, fur and feathers moth-eaten, covered in a thick layer of dust, half-fallen off their perches and yellow with age. Hmmm.........think I should have stayed by the pool!
No comments:
Post a Comment