麻豆社

India is falling in love with Western classical music. In his home-city Mumbai, Zareer Masani encounters the country's first national ensemble, the Symphony Orchestra of India. He visits Furtado's, the city's oldest music shop, which sells hundreds of pianos a year, and discovers that thousands of children learn a Western instrument.

Yet, Zareer finds that this is not the total success it seems. Only a dozen of the Symphony Orchestra of India鈥檚 members are Indian; the pianos Furtado's sell are status symbols; students learn to play because this will help them get into foreign universities. But, Zareer finds out, there is real love for Western music, among Mumbai's most elite and poorest - he discovers a choir of the children of sex workers. Zareer considers these contradictions, and the implications for India's own classical music.

(Photo: Indian conductor Zubin Metha conducts the orchestra during a rehearsal in Mumbai, 7 October 2008. Credit: Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images)