Museum of Me 2026

What I like about museums is that they are full of dead people who refuse to mind their own business.

You enter quietly, preferably after paying thirty rupees extra because you are carrying a camera nobody will ever use, and immediately somebody from the 2nd century BC starts interfering with your emotional life.

An old brass pot stares at you.
A sword with rust problems judges your modern relationships.
A painting of some emperor with digestive difficulties appears to know exactly why your blood pressure is high.

As a hypnotherapist, I have always had a slightly suspicious relationship with museums.

Why preserve all this old clutter? Why not let the dead quietly become dead? Why drag up an exhausted Harappan cooking vessel from three feet under the earth and place it under fluorescent lighting in an air-conditioned hall where schoolchildren wearing sticky shoes can point at it and say, “Mummy, see ancient dabba.”

Sometimes I imagine the poor urn itself protesting.

“Please,” it says, “bury me again. I have retired. I am not interested in heritage walks. Also, no, I will not reveal what Thangavelu cooked in me in 1432 BC. Leave me alone.”

Civilizations are also very sentimental about age.

Everybody says proudly, “Our civilization is 3000 years old.”

This is usually announced in the same tone with which South Bombay aunties discuss family jewellery.

“Our civilization is 3000 years old.”
“Our pearls are Basra.”
“Our trauma is imported.”

But what are we really saying when we boast about antiquity?

Perhaps we are only saying: We were here. We mattered. Please do not erase us.

For years I thought museums were simply institutions for preserving artifacts and confusing tourists. Then a Japanese friend explained museums to me in a way that stayed.

She said museums are bridges.

Not buildings. Not storage units. Bridges.

And once she said it, I could not unhear it.

Because history does not disappear merely because modern people become busy with Wi-Fi passwords and oat milk. Hiroshima happened. The nuclear dust settled not only on land, but on memory, on the nervous system, on generations yet unborn.

Human beings carry history in the body.

A hypnotherapist sees this all the time. Families inherit silence like furniture. Fear travels genetically with excellent efficiency. Grief quietly changes posture, breathing, appetite, even the quality of sleep.

Museums perhaps exist because memory needs a home.

Not home as property papers and modular kitchens.
Home as recognition.

The feeling that somebody before us also feared abandonment. Also danced wildly. Also prayed for rain. Also sat near the sea wondering whether life made any sense whatsoever.

Maybe that is why people wander through museums so slowly.

Nobody is really looking at objects.

We are looking for ourselves.

A museum, at its best, heals the divide between exile and belonging.

Between memory and forgetting.
Between shame and acceptance.
Between who we are privately and who society requires us to become publicly.

Take Aurangzeb, for instance.

You stand before his portrait and immediately everybody becomes either historian, nationalist, secularist, television panelist, or WhatsApp university professor.

But perhaps the painting asks a quieter question.

How does one remain true to oneself while trapped inside the machinery of power, duty and expectation?

History is rarely about kings. It is usually about human beings negotiating impossible interiors.

Which is why museums sometimes feel strangely alive.

I remember visiting the folklore museum in Kochi. Beautiful place. Wooden staircases that creak like old family gossip. Carvings everywhere. The whole building smells faintly of memory and coconut oil.

On the third floor stood the prototype of an aniyaram.

I stood there casually, doing nothing particularly spiritual. Suddenly I felt something shift inside me. Not dramatically. No lightning. No background music. Just an ancient pull rising quietly through the body.

An urge to dance.

I borrowed the salangai from the host and began moving to music that did not exist externally. It was the roar of the sea. The cry of seagulls. The sound of something very old remembering itself through me.

At that moment the museum stopped being a museum.

It became home.

Not home of walls and ownership and EMI.

Home as rhythm.
Home as ancestry.
Home as the strange comfort of realizing that the past is not dead material sealed behind glass.

It is still breathing softly inside us.

Which is perhaps why museums matter after all.

Not because they preserve the past.

But because occasionally, if we are lucky, they return us to ourselves.