One Click to Culture - Indian Express, New Delhi

One Click to Culture 

Indian Express, New Delhi

17 June 2008

The spotlight is on culture, as this club provides reviews, previews and a platform for amateurs to display their talent.

Art connoisseurs head to tony galleries to discuss Hussain’s horses and Raza’s acclaimed bindu while booklovers have had to nudge their way into book reading sessions. Theatre aficionados, meanwhile, meet in dark auditoriums to ponder over Shakespeare’s productions. For culture-savvy Delhiites, the distinction between the varied fields of art has always been explicit. However, now, Ankur Sharma is all set to blur these boundaries. His medium is Culturazzi, a club. “Through this we will bring together culture enthusiasts from all fields,” he explains, while introducing his brainchild that had a soft launch through a blog in April.

Barely three months later, the forum already attracts more than 150 readers every day, 50 of whom are regular visitors. “The response has been amazing,” smiles Sharma, 26, as he goes on to introduce different aspects of the society. The mechanism is simple: Gurgaon-based Sharma and his team of associates scan through millions of international titles to select “most off-beat and unique” films, music albums, books and theatre productions and pen a review which is posted on the Culturazzi blog. The readers are free to post comments and offer suggestions. “We aren’t specialists but there is a lot of research that goes into the writing of these reviews,” notes Sharma, who is a marketing manager at Drishti-Soft Solutions. He adds, “At a later stage we will allow people to write reviews, but a panel will screen them.”

Eventually, he plans to organise meetings in cities across India, beginning with Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune, where Culturazzi already has a growing member base. “We hope to invite experts to provide a detailed insight,” notes Ritambhara Sharma, a Culturazzi member and student at Symbiosis, Pune. Sharma, adds, “Amateurs will be provided with a platform to showcase their talent. For instance, budding authors will be allowed to discuss their manuscripts and artists can upload pictures of their work on our website.”

Meanwhile, interaction between culturazzi members will also take place in the virtual world through a chat engine on its website. “After all, the aim is to get people who share similar interests together,” states Sharma, as he picks a poster advertising an upcoming Jazz performance at Epicentre. “A review will be put on our blog soon,” he smiles.

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