I have been busy working on gathering the details of my father's early life, before he got married to my mother, even before he left his family home to become a journalist.
It is quite a job to dig out the past from those who lived through it. Depending on the subject they either express freely or guardedly. In any case they usually tend to digress when they talk about the past. It is difficult to bring them back on track once they go off at a tangent. Under pressure, they do return to the topic, albeit reluctantly, for they have been interrupted in their free flow of memory.
It is surprising to note how much of a man's life is a history of his time. It becomes doubly interesting when the man had spent a considerable part of his life in shaping the events now considered part of history.
Indeed, history is man's collective story. Every one of us leaves a little history behind which posterity will either love to cherish or hasten to bury. History though is unburiable and surfaces time and again in the pages of a historian or a sensitive writer.
I find the work of digging into my father's life quite interesting, even fascinating at times. I have collected scores of photographs and anecdotes. There is a lot of work to do and the job remains unfinished until the man lives again through the pages of the written word.
I have started putting together some random notes and scanned photographs. I have begun to blog at bjbnr.blogspot.com where I am attempting biographical sketches using the information I am gathering from time to time.
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