Mumbai's NCPA turns 50 and is throwing a cultural extravaganza to celebrate

NCPA will showcase old favourites and new productions in a festival marking the Mumbai culture venue's 50-year-old history

Plans for the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) had been afoot when Khushroo Suntook began working for the Tata companies in the late 1960s. He remembers its founder Jamshed Bhabha and JRD Tata in discussion, picking out only the very best people for the job of building a cultural centre — Philip Johnson, a giant of modern American architecture, and the acoustician Cyril Harris, an authority on shaping concert hall sound. NCPA was opened by Indira Gandhi in 1969, and when they added the Tata Theatre in 1980, it was designed such that “you could hear a whisper sitting