"Let Us Be Good Memories” — On the Power of Memory, Storytelling, and the Echoes We Leave Behind

During a lecture in my first year of college, as we studied epics like the Mahābhārata and the Iliad, my professor paused mid-sentence, looked up from the text, and said something that has stayed with me ever since:

“When the whole world dies, even when brick and mortar is destroyed, memory survives. It survives and lives on in generations to come. And literature carries that memory. All your geography, your economics, your psychology—they’re all based on the memory of man, passed down generation after generation. These epic poems and literature we are studying right now are to remind us that we too will be memories one day. And therefore, let us be good memories.”

At that moment, the room fell into a reflective silence. A pin could have dropped and echoed like a gong. Because what he said was not just about literature—it was about life. About legacy. About who we are when nothing else remains.

Across time and space, memory has been the anchor of civilizations. When cities fall, when maps are redrawn, when language evolves and erodes—what survives is the story. The whispered lullaby from a grandmother in Lagos. The harvest chant in a Sikkimese village. The mourning songs of the Irish, or the desert tales of the Bedouins. Storytelling is not mere entertainment—it is cultural preservation, emotional continuity, and sometimes, even resistance.

Inuit communities knew where British ships had disappeared into the Arctic, not through sonar or radar, but because they remembered. In oral maps passed down like heirlooms, they guided modern scientists to the truth. In Africa, griots held the political and social histories of entire kingdoms in their songs. In India, the Mahābhārata was not written before it was sung—sung for centuries until it etched itself into the collective memory of a civilization.

But in our fast-paced digital world, we are losing the sacred slowness of storytelling. We skim, we swipe, we forget. Children today may know how to search, but not how to listen. We are consuming information, not absorbing memory. And this is dangerous—because a culture that does not remember, does not survive.

Memory is not always about the grand or the glorious. Sometimes, it is as quiet as a bedtime story, as ordinary as a ritual, as fleeting as a phrase. And yet, it is in these simple transmissions that our humanity lies.

So let us teach children to hold onto stories, not just scroll through screens. Let us tell our tales—of love, of loss, of laughter—not just to be heard, but to be remembered.

Because one day, we too will be memories.

Let us be good ones.

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At Spin A Yarn India, we believe that stories—especially in our indigenous languages—are the living soul of our heritage. We work with families and schools to bring back the magic of oral storytelling across generations, cultures, and communities. With over 800+ schools already onboard, we’re just getting started. If your school would like to be part of this movement to protect, preserve, and pass down the stories that shaped us, visit www.spinayarnindia.com. Let’s raise a generation that listens deeply, remembers truly, and tells stories that matter.