kolkata a fading section in the citys cultural frieze will finally get a fresh coat of paint after a long wait the 78odd prized paintings of the asiatic society will soon get the healing touch of specialists for over a decade the society had been desperately trying to restore these 18th century paintings but it had failed to find the right agency for the jobfinally a recent visit by the president of the royal asiatic society london rasl francis robinson renewed hopes that the priceless paintings might be saved after all rasl experts could soon start work on the timechipped paintingsof the 78 paintings at least 16 are in an extremely fragile condition these include priceless works of masters like daniel joshua reynolds and guidothe initial talks are over we are now waiting for robinson to work out the modalities he will let us know by the end of this month dilip coomer ghosh general secretary of the society told tnnthe society had once sought the help of the lucknowbased national research laboratory for conservation of cultural property in restoring these 16 paintingsbut even they were unable to provide a solution our expert committee on paintings including specialists from victoria memorial rabindra bharati university and indian museum too felt we might risk losing these paintings if we tried to restore them so we had dropped the idea ghosh saidrobinson however examined the paintings and assured the society that rasl experts had the expertise and the technology to safely restore the works of art in fact rasl restorers had salvaged paintings by the same masters and dating back to the same period he saidthe two societies also plan to hold exchange programmes of scholars and manuscripts from next yearthe understanding was that continuous exchange programmes between the two societies would be organised to benefit studies related to indologybut all that we had been able to do till now was exchange publicationsrobinson and i have chalked out the initial plans for further cooperationunder the new scheme the catalogues of both societies will be available with each other for the scholars benefitresearchers from the city could make short trips to the uk to collect material from the archives there and vice versa we now need to finalise how such scholars will be selected and how the expenses will be borne ghosh said