A little-known German website, Worth a Journey, has ranked the Bihar Museum ninth among the world's best museums, ahead of the Louvre, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Significantly, this was its first such exercise. A little inquiry into its credentials reveals that its publisher, Jakob Schwichtenberg, has also undertaken to rank the world's best bakeries, kebab shops and sundry other attractions. The rankings are based on an analysis of millions of visitor reviews with the assistance of algorithms and artificial intelligence, supplemented by physical inspections. The visits must have been secret and surreptitious because they have left no footprints.
Nevertheless, the Indian press faithfully reported this remarkable achievement, the museum establishment celebrated its international recognition, and the celebrations were taken as further confirmation of the museum's eminence. It is rather like the infinite regress of images between two parallel mirrors. Each reflection lends credibility to the next until the original source disappears into the distance. Nobody thinks to ask who is holding the first mirror.
Somewhere in its enthusiasm for rating museums and mutton kebabs, the website seems to have got the mutton and museum bit mixed up. It situates the Ninth Best Bihar Museum at Mutton Mahal on Bailey Road, opposite the New Bihar Museum, Kidwai Puri. An enigma wrapped in a mystery! Bailey Road is one of Patna's principal thoroughfares, running some fifteen to eighteen kilometres from Dak Bungalow Road towards Saguna More. Kidwai Puri, on the other hand, is a residential colony reached by turning off the main road near the Income Tax roundabout. Which museum, then, has our German benefactor actually ranked? The one housed in Mutton Mahal or the New Bihar Museum opposite it?
https://worthajourney.com/museums/bihar-museum/
A travel guide exists, presumably, to guide travellers to their destinations. But even the misguided tourist may find some consolation here. Bihar is justly famous for its Champaran mutton, and Patna abounds in establishments offering this celebrated delicacy. The traveller who sets out in search of the ninth-best museum in the world may end up discovering one of Bihar's finest culinary traditions. He may miss the museum altogether, but it will not have been a wasted journey. The German benefactor's website is aptly named Worth a Journey after all.
It is not for me to look a gift horse in the mouth. I rejoice in the fact that the news could not have come at a more opportune moment, with Bihar in a right royal mess, scores of thousands of Bihar government employees facing the spectre of going without salary, and contractors who have executed public works for the government of Bihar hitting the roads to demand that their bills be paid. The salaries may be late in arriving, but the global ranking arrived on time.
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