She has many firsts to her credit. To promote Indian craft, art, architecture and performing arts, she started the Madras Craft Foundation. To showcase traditional south Indian homes, she built a museum called Dakshinachitra.

Now, for the first time in the country, the Madras Craft Foundation, in collaboration with Dakshinachitra, offers an Arts Management Internship Diploma course.

She cites the example of Neville Tuli, who was a professor of economics in London. He came to India and started the auction house Osian in Mumbai, although he didn't know anything about contemporary art. "He wondered why we had to hold all our auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's, so he created Osian. His company is now going public and is valued at Rs 240 crore. I am telling you his story because, when you combine passion for the arts with management skill, you can go anywhere."

How do you manage an arts institution? The role of management, in all private arts institutions, is to look at the priorities and how to get funding for those priorities because any institute has to be self-sustainable. Management should also know how to market what you do -- it has to understand the content. All these are equally important for an arts institution as well as for business.

Deborah found no such institutions in India, which train arts managers. She thought about it for a couple of years and, a year ago, decided to start one to train those interested in arts management. "Experiments succeed or fail, but you have to have the courage to start something unique," she says.

Another reason why she wanted to create Arts Managers was because she met youngsters at Dakshinachitra who were interested in art but didn't have the background. "To really manage arts at a place like Dakshinachitra -- a centre for cultural studies, performing arts -- one has to know how they developed and look at them in an unbiased way. We need knowledgeable people who have a wider understanding of art and a wider understanding of management to manage complex institutions like the National Museum or Dakshinachitra."

Text: Shobha Warrier
Photographs: Sreeram Selvaraj