The Department of Archaeology, Museums, and Heritage will celebrate International Museum Day on Sunday and conduct a guided heritage tour through some of the finest museums in the city to mark the occasion. The tour is restricted to the first 100 people who have already registered for the event online and will be free of cost. The tour will commence from the Southern Regional Centre of the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (IGRMS) on the Irwin Road and also include the new gallery, showcasing a collection of paintings. The second museum to be covered is the Regional Museum of Natural History in Siddarthanagar from where the participants will be taken to Payana, which is the new showstopper in the city’s museum circuit. Located on the outskirts of Mysuru on the Bengaluru-Mysuru Highway, this has an impressive collection of automobiles, including vintage cars. The last stop will be the Mysuru Rail Museum, which has a collection of steam locomotives, mechanical contraptions used in a bygone era by the railways. The tour will commence at 8 a.m. and conclude late in the afternoon and includes lunch for the participants. The IGRMS, which was established in 2001, is located in Wellington Lodge, which is a heritage structure and was built around 1799 CE. The exhibits here showcase the evolution of material culture and indigenous and traditional lifestyles, local knowledge systems, etc., in different parts of India. The Regional Museum of Natural History was inaugurated in May 1995 and is adjacent to Karanji Natural Park and showcases the flora and fauna of southern parts of India. Incidentally, this was the first regional centre of the National Museum of Natural History at New Delhi. Payana, which is in the private domain, was inaugurated in 2024 and has since become a must-visit among tourists visiting Mysuru and showcases the automotive heritage, taking the visitor on a nostalgic journey back in time. The Mysuru Rail Museum is an outdoor collection of rail exhibits that range from steam locomotives that chugged along the length and the breadth of the country till the 1970s and 80s before they were supplanted by diesel and electric locomotives. It also has the Maharani’s Saloon, which was the luxury saloon used by the royals of Mysuru. Among the other outdoor exhibits are inspection cars, a toy train, an Austin rail motor car, while the evolution of the signalling system has been depicted in a separate gallery The choice of the museums is also significant as they cover a range of themes from human evolution to natural history, art and culture to transportation and innovations. International Museums Day is celebrated every year on May 18th by the International Council of Museums. The objective, as declared by ICOM, is to raise public awareness on how “museums are an important means of cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures, and development of mutual understanding, cooperation, and peace among peoples.”