Sarayu Doshi, honorary director of NGMA, and Vimla Patil, who has helped out with the publicity, ascribed the poor response to ``the people's denial of Indian history.'' Patil told Express Newsline, ``We sent an invitation to the school across the road and got replies like `our students are busy with something else, they'll come if they get a chance to.' An art museum would anyway be lower down people's priority list in comparison with something like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.''

Stressing that the Mahishasurmardini, a standing Bodhisattva, Krishna, Parvati and other such objects are still in search of the people'sappreciation, Doshi said: ``This gets reflected in the total moral bankruptcy one sees today.'' The exhibition of 90 objects -- sculptures in stone, metal, terracotta, miniature paintings and decorative objects in jade covers 2000 years of India's history and is drawn from the collection housed at the Museum of Indian Art, Berlin. It will close on January 3, 1999.

``The response to the exhibition is nowhere close to what British Council's Enduring Image got. A lot of people don't even know about it. We would not have known about the exhibition ourselves if we weren't told in class about it,'' said Garima Jaisalmeria and Rashmi Pusalkar, students of the history of art in Sophiya Polytechnic. ``It's not that NGMA hasn't given adequate publicity to the exhibition. The comparison of this exhibition with Enduring Image isn't quite right. The scale and budget of the two exhibitions are entirely different,'' Doshi said.

However, several allied activities, such as the recitation by Amrish Puri ofKanupriya, a collection of poems written by Dr Dharmavir Bharati and the performance of Geet Govind by Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra organised at the NGMA were well received.