Museums aren’t the most exuberant places you would find. It is quiet everywhere, everything is delicate but despite all this, every object in museums has a story to tell.
In my opinion, museums can be monotonous sometimes, but not every museum is, nor every object in the museum is. Museums are not always dinosaur bones or historical artefacts like the tools early civilisation used. There are art museums, museums for seashells and sculptures at Mahabalipuram for example or for agriculture in New Delhi or even textiles! This aspect is what I like about museums, they are a place full of interesting and intriguing historical things that were a part of who we were and who we are now and it is not always skeletons or tools that remind us of this but several other things like the arts from sculpting to textile designs and sciences, like agriculture, engineering and many more.
Moreover, museums motivate us to keep at least some regional ancient arts and crafts alive and not as a rare thing in a museum before people forget who they were because it is our culture and it is a beautiful skill specific to a region. More significantly, they make me realise that the world has a huge range of biodiversity and many wonders of nature, some of them are at the museum due to natural extinction but some of them might soon be in museums due to our carelessness and our inability to protect nature and responsibly utilise what it gave. If we don’t act now, eventually a drop of clean water might be in the museum or forests and natural landscapes might just remain as pictures at a museum or skeletons might just be what is left of wildlife.
Finally, as Carl Sagan said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” I like that they make us stop and look back at how we came to live our contemporary modern lives, the amazing inventions of humans, the power of the human brain, or the fascinating gifts of nature and inspire us to do something new and great for humankind. History doesn’t change the past but it can likely change the future.
Featured image: Rail Museum, Bangalore