There was a life that was quiet and unassuming in the not-so-distant past. People interacted and shared their thoughts and concerns. During those days, when fixed-line telephones were a rarity and cellphones were not in the radar of our dreams, society itself became the social media and we searched for quotes in books or the memory of those people, as there was no search engine either.

Those days, every man and woman was a museum, a spirited biography that we all read without knowing.

When I left  the place where I was born and my home country in search of new challenges and possibilities in my career, the world had become much faster and we started interacting with machines more than our beings. During my travels, I got the chance to visit museums that immortalized the life of many great people. 
In our childhood, the neighbourhood itself was a museum and every other man and woman a fragment of living history, and whatever quotes we read in the books we heard directly from them, of course without dogmatizing it or peppering it with inscrutable philosophy.

But how many of them have been documented? The oral tradition of a period… the genuine thoughts of the unknown citizens… knowledge and micro-history are still unknown to many, and we probably belonged to the last generation that was lucky enough to listen to all these things.

What provoked such thoughts was a quote somebody shared from American novelist Nicholas Sparks’ ‘The Notebook’. 

“I am a common man with common thoughts, and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough,” it read. 

This is the history of every common man and woman. Their philosophy is forgotten even before they pass away. But the generations before me had that magic of remembering everything and passing it on to the progeny, thus keeping those memories and visions alive.

It was then a weird idea struck me. Whatever has been lost is lost, but why not make an effort to document whatever is available and also record the memories and experiences of the veterans who can shed some light on the life and times of the people who lived here? This way, if some concerted effort is made, every local library can be transformed into a museum – a museum of microhistory and biography.

One may wonder why such lives should be documented at all. There are a lot of reasons.

The forgotten tales from the lives of those ordinary people have the spark of an age that witnessed many great things. Even the words and adages that we forget may be revived this way. Language evolves through the lives of the people and many things that were part of the oral tradition could be passed on to the generation led by the search engines. 
The food habits, the climate, the environmental protection measures based on local knowledge and wisdom… the generation that lived before the tech-driven times imbibed everything from their real-life experience that was rooted in the equations of nature.

Even the local schools can build such a local biography and microhistory museum using the possibilities of high-tech classrooms. This way, when you move forward in time, the lives of the people who went ahead of you would prove to be the catalysts for you.

Mahatma Gandhi, who acknowledged the capacity of every individual aptly said, “My life is my message.” 

Yes, every life is a message, so we have to document every spark of life in its details to ensure they live among us forever. The world belongs to the children of the lesser god too!

About the author: Reena Rahman is the Chief Executive Officer of Khartoum-based SunAir.