Scribbling for keepsake

They can be real treasure troves, there for keepsake. Some never see the light of day and remain deeply personal, some used to jog one's memory and turned into published books. Many remain a cherished read long after they've been scribbled on by now rusty, yellow, pieces of paper.

Although we tend to think of them as yearly notebooks once the year is over casually thrown away, diaries are an important part of one's life as brief, maybe wrapped view of happenings.

Many people tend to keep diaries, judiciously jotting down notes of events that happen to them on a daily, or should I say nightly basis—keeping track of the meanderings of the day--a bird's eye view if you like.

And this tends to go on for years and years, with ordinary people writing down scrapes of sentences about things that happen to them in the course of their life.

While it is not always the case for many diary keepers, a great deal of people, almost write short-hand accounts of their daily trials and tribulations, brief words and mutterings here and there, almost in esoteric scribe only they know of and can decipher.

Ordinary people, young pupils, youths, housewives, girlfriends, bachelors and many more have been known to keep diaries of sketching their lives away as if it is part of their existence.

After a while, they stop, and the dairy is bungled into one of their drawers, old suitcases or chest of drawers. Years later, it is still there, lethargically laying around, getting old and yellowish with a musty aura, until it is picked up, more like remembered, by the person who wrote it, or another person, relative maybe, who divulges into past set of secrets and personal values and predjuices.

I remember when I was young, one of my headmasters would read on special occasions the dairy—in raw form—of one of the old students who attended the school, decided to keep a diary of his stay there and then threw it away in one of the chest of drawers only to be found decades later still in mint form. I think he was trying to emphasize to us the importance of writing, and reading for that matter.

Unlike the headmaster, we young minds and eyes looked at the reading with a sense of triviality. As foretold in the way he was reading, and handing the little book, he clearly felt he was holding a tiny piece of history as seen through primordial human instincts.