Kiran Seth

Kiran Seth, born in 1949, is an engineer and academic who founded SPIC MACAY, the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth, in 1977 and turned it into a volunteer movement that takes classical performers into schools and colleges rather than concert halls.

The idea came to him abroad. While studying for a doctorate at Columbia University in New York, Seth attended a dhrupad recital by Nasir Aminuddin Dagar and Zia Fariduddin Dagar at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was struck that a tradition of that depth was largely unknown to young Indians. He returned to India in 1976 to teach and research operations research at IIT Delhi, and the following year started SPIC MACAY there with a group of students. The first concert, by the Junior Dagar Brothers, was held at IIT Delhi on 28 March 1978.

The organising principle he set has held since: performances are free, held in educational institutions, and organised by student volunteers, so that young people encounter classical music and dance as part of their ordinary surroundings rather than as a ticketed event. The movement has spread to chapters in thousands of towns in India and abroad, running several thousand programmes a year across concerts, lecture demonstrations, night-long recitals, yoga camps, screenings of classic cinema, heritage walks and craft workshops, along with its Virasat and Fest series, national conventions and a scholarship programme. Seth has also cycled across India to promote the movement's message together with fitness and Gandhian thought.

He is professor emeritus at IIT Delhi and served as vice-chairman of the governing council of the Film and Television Institute of India between 2012 and 2014. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009.[2][3]