Celebrating the day for museums

As the globe celebrates this day dedicated for Museums, many activities related to museum are organised in Mumbai city.  City museums, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum and the GVK ‘Jaya He’ Museum at the Mumbai International Airport, will organise number of activities on Thursday to mark the International Museum Day.  Institutions across the world are celebrating the day to raise the awareness and importance of museums in contemporary culture. The events lined up include free craft workshops, storytelling sessions, tours and quizzes. Like every year the International Council of Museums, which promotes the occasion has declared a theme for the celebrations. This year, the theme is ‘Museums and Contested Histories: Saying the Unspeakable in Museums’.As per a report published in Indian Express, Himanshu Kadam, the assistant curator at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum said, “It is important to celebrate this day to let people know that museums are not dead, static spaces and that they have a role to play in how society develops. In our workshop ‘Mumbai’s Communities: Peopling the City’, we will be talking about how Mumbai was always a cosmopolitan city and that its identity is not linked to any one particular language or regional identity. The museum is a safe educational space where such a conversation is possible,”  Bilwa Kulkarni, the education officer at the CSMVS, said, “Museums are not just reminders of how a particular society developed in a particular time but they are actually important in the development of an inclusive, tolerant and culturally aware society. By being open to interpretation, museums have the capacity to accommodate several different narratives of the same past.” He added, “This is the first step to establishing dialogue and reconciliation towards a peaceful shared future.”