Museums

Today's muse is an ode to museums on occasion of International Museum Day. A museum is a building that refuses to forget. Civilisations fade, languages die, and ways of living get paved over. The museum puts a roof over what remains.

Humans collect for two reasons: evidence and longing. Proof of the past, of the things invented, of the battles fought. Longing because every exhibit is a world that is lost to us or is on the way out. 

Museums are born from an innate human drive to preserve, understand and share our collective memory. They are driven by a desire to educate the public, celebrate cultural identity, and protect historical artifacts from being lost to time.

Museums are about the choice to display, to showcase, to label... a choice about whose story gets a room. The British Museum holds the Parthenon Marbles; Greece holds the empty space where they stood. Both are museums now: one of objects, one of absence. 

The museum exhibits chronology so we can see patterns of how our ancestors lived. It is the only place where you can watch the Stone Age end and the Space Age begin in thirty steps. We look, we read the text, we listen to the narrator. We revisit the past.

However a good museum is not a mausoleum. It is about the past we want to hold on to. Good museums let things breathe: rotating exhibits, living artists, community curators, repatriation. It is about a continued conversation aiming to retrieve, restore and refuse to forget.

Was the past perfect? No! But there are lessons to be learnt. To do the things that were right and to learn from the things that were wrong. The museum can be our talisman to learn the right lessons. 

They relive the past, unlike the dead mausoleum 

The present is grateful to the lovely museums!

~ Pravin K Sabnis

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