धरोहर

Archives and Repository Centre

‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought’, said Lord Buddha. Archives are a preservation of what we once thought resulting in deed. What we forget can never be retold. Retelling can never replace preservation.

The archives of an institution are its founding fathers. It is the history of a place, preserved in its people and values that paints the picture of its present and builds a cradle for its future. It is imperative to look at the beginning in order to make sense of the journey that one has undertaken. Through time, one preserves different versions of oneself in time capsules, locked within a frame, within a memory, something to come back to. These versions then become collective memories, not a memory of a single being but of time. It is through these archives of memories, left by the ancestors that one digs through , to plant a seed, a seed that will germinate into yet another path reserved for someone else to take and come back to, to make sense of their own present.

In preserving ideas, we find a way to preserve people. The significance of preservation can only be felt when the shadow of the legacy of an idea, of an institution looms large over the privileges of the present. It is only through following the fine footprints of a legacy enclosed in its annals, one can learn to understand and appreciate the freedom that a legacy has bestowed on its tenants, and thus through understanding this privilege, we ensure its vitality. If storytelling is an art, then the re-telling of a story is a craft. Re-telling of stories has little to do with imagination and everything to do with memory and evidence. A memory without an evidence is merely a myth, and the foundation of any institution has no place for myths.

It is with this thought that the Archives and Repository Centre of Maharaja Agrasen College has undertaken the task of preserving its heritage of the last 25 years. It was indeed a pleasure to find history sometimes in the letter found while rummaging through a drawer,in the yellowed pages of a prospectus, a journal, a torn magazine or some old photographs kept in the pages of a book. All tell a story ... that needs to be archived and reposted safely in the annals of history. We present before you a loaded capsule, replete with the archival treasure of MAC in a pictorial form as it moves into its 25th year, from the innocence of the youth to the maturity of an adult.