Genealogy

I have been wanting to trace my family history for a long long time now. The reason for this is as follows: I am perfectly aware that there is no such thing as the golden age of humanity, and neither was there ever an innocent generation devoid of all malice and hardship. Human struggle and trepidation is one uniting factor which bridges people across decades and centuries. Looking back through the glasses of nostalgia we run the risk of painting a very untrue picture of the past. A picture where people were more honest, families were stronger and nobler, individuals were wiser - a picture which is untrue because it ignores the fact that humans have always been and will always be just that, merely human. They will be dissatisfied as they have been through the centuries. They will have struggles as they have always had. The form of these struggles change but the essence remains intact. I get a rush when I can give relatable names to these individuals who lived hundreds of years ago, who probably lived a very ordinary, very uphill, and very human life but who hold a special position in my life by virtue of being my ancestors. I can then move up my chain and witness generations after generations of names I have heard occupying their own little 60 years of sunshine withering away against the onslaught of time. Their legacy is merely the gift of the next generation - only to vanish in another 60 years. And every single one of those hundreds upon thousands of individuals probably thought their child was the chosen one and that they themselves had a special understanding of life. Every single one of them probably had staunch religious, casteist, and national loyalties, a whole edifice of moral beliefs, a little house where they started a family, an income avenue, people they disliked, individuals they loved, stupid, unflinching ideas, ideas they were probably right about and ideas they were completely wrong and shortsighted at, a whole system of cuisine, a language which was perhaps very different from what I speak now. Some of them might have stood in the courts of nawabs or princes, most of them probably had dark lingering secrets, all of them contributed to this vast pulsating sea of drama which is life and upon whose surface ebb and flow the waves of human emotions. It's simply fascinating.

So I finally made a site, Genealogy, through which I hope I will be able to trace my family's ancestry through time and space. While I am stuck here in India at the whims and fancies of the US department of state, I am trying to make use of this time by gleaning as much information as I can. In so doing I came across the diary of my maternal grandfather. Now he was a special person, the kind of person which, I am afraid, doesn't exist in my family anymore and is very rare to come across even outside of the family. My memories of him consist of him sitting me by his side in a cozily lit room on a cold December evening at my uncle's Dairy colony house in Gorakhpur and telling me stories from sources as varied as Mahabharata and Tolstoy. His formal education consisted merely of matriculation (it might have been a lot in 1940s) and all his life was spent in the Railways but that did not prevent him from harboring an immense respect for knowledge. It seemed to me that he managed to do something which only occurs sparingly: he managed to save the primal curiosity which everyone is blessed with from the eroding winds of life. And I see it in his diary. Little episodic entries, quite disconnected, completely useless to a man of the world, but how I love them for their utter futility. I think I understand how happy and fascinated he must have felt when he learned that our star is one in a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, how satisfied it must have made him to list down the Aaroh and Avroh of Darbari, how happy he must have become while roaming alone on the streets of old Lucknow amidst the Nawabi ruins and the cultural landscape. There is no pretense, no malice, and no regret, just a childlike curiosity and a desire to know more. How I wish I could talk to him now so that I could ask him the one question I want to ask all the old people, 'How has it been?', and get a special answer.