Choosing a path less trodden: My journey into the world of museums

We live in an era of circular economies and global citizenship. Long gone are the days of Jules Verne when going around the world in 80 days was considered a mighty miracle. In the 153 years since his novel was first published in French in 1872, the world has grown smaller, seamless and surreal on every realm, with more to come. The dizzying dynamics of technology and artificial intelligence has become synonymous with human functionality. My journey into the world of museums with its trajectory across continents and oceans seems increasingly like the metaphor for the metaverse.

At a time, when Museum Studies was not a chosen field of academic or popular professional pursuit, I chose this path less trodden, graduating from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, which had the foresight to pioneer a (now discontinued) Master’s program focused on the history of Science, Technology and Industry. While I began my career establishing a planetarium and science centre complex in Jaipur, the allure of the West was hard to resist as I pursued academic excellence as a Commonwealth Scholar in Canada and later migrated to the United States.

Though this single-minded pursuit forced me to leave home and hearth, I could not consciously leave my altruistic purpose of establishing institutions of higher societal purpose, be it museums, nature centres, themed attractions, oceanariums, science centres, planetariums and memorials. Many of these projects yielded amazing forays into far-away destinations and precipitated path-breaking engagements with some of the best minds in their fields, ranging from paleontologists, astronauts, anthropologists, ornithologists, cardiologists, entomologists, physicists, political scientists to musicians, to name a few. Every interaction, teaching me the humility of learning and bettering myself as a human. This realisation continues to be a blessing in the tech-induced information age that robs us of empathy for the fellow-being.

The ubiquitous smart phones have dulled our memory and drastically impacted our dependency on them. We forget that an Apple I-phone performs an estimated 2.58 teraflops of calculations making it many times faster than the CRAY 2 Super Computer of yesteryears. Mobile devices of today are millions of times faster than the guidance systems that landed man on the moon on Apollo missions, not to mention that their puny package can be snuck into your pockets packing a phenomenal paradigm-shattering punch. They provide information at lightning speeds, allow for medium businesses to run on their platforms and transport us instantly into the meta-world of global immersion.

With NVIDIAs of the world invading every level of possibility with ever-increasing speed and ease of operation, the time-frame for designing, curating, producing and installing exhibit experiences has shrunk exponentially, not to mention harnessing global talent and fusing timelines of deliverables, that balances cost differentials and defies convention. Technology has enabled me to simultaneously execute museum design-build projects in multiple geographical locations from Norway to Jamaica to Galapagos to India on any given day.

Vital to the process of curation is to experience, engage and embed oneself in the socio-cultural milieu of the geography where a cultural institution is taking form. Aided by the content experts, it provides the necessary framework of reference that allows for the realisation of its spatial manifestation in a gallery or museum setting. Each vignette created is nurtured with sensitivity and tempered with the variables of budget, timeline and client compulsions.

A museum could show me the world but can never be the world. Life is a living museum filled with moments and mementos where many worlds intersect to amplify aspirational pitch, wavelength and frequency towards greater resonance with the greater good.

(India-born Dr George Jacob, FRCGS, is one of the world’s leading museum planners and designers, whose work spans over 100 museums across four continents)

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