One of the stark realities confronting us today is our collective inability to preserve records. This weakness is not just a passing flaw; it is a cultural and historical gap that continues to deny us clarity about our past and preparedness for our future. Whether due to social conditioning, lack of training, inadequate education, or plain neglect, the fact remains that obtaining reliable documentation of our history, heritage, or even administrative activities is a daunting task.
It is a known fact that our ancestors left no written records, relying instead on oral traditions. While this preserved stories for generations, it also invited distortions and inconsistencies. Today, these gaps fuel controversies over land, lineage, and historical claims that cannot be conclusively settled. Without verifiable records, facts are blurred, and speculation fills the void.
Unfortunately, the trend has not improved in modern times. In literature, there is a striking scarcity of writers beyond theological fields. Historical and creative works are rare, leaving wide areas of our society undocumented. Even journalists, who should act as scribes of the present, are yet to rise fully to the responsibility of recording our social, political, and cultural journey in its entirety.
Public institutions fare no better. Many government departments lack proper filing systems, digitized archives, or retrievable databases. Computers and internet access came late, but that is no longer an excuse. In an era where digitization and cloud storage are standard practice worldwide, Nagaland still struggles to move beyond paper files and fragmented records.
The consequences are serious. When future generations look for data about places like Mokokchung or key moments in our socio-political journey, even AI-powered searches will return little, because the basic records simply do not exist. Technology can only process what we feed it; if we leave the shelves empty, there will be nothing to retrieve.
This calls for a cultural shift. Citizens, scholars, and journalists must commit to documenting events, personalities, and milestones. Writers must move beyond the confines of theological themes and explore broader fields such as fiction, biography, history, and contemporary narratives that capture the evolving life of our society. Government offices should adopt digitization and create open, accessible archives. Civil society must value documentation as an investment for posterity.
The future will be unkind to a society that fails to record its story. Let us not allow our present to vanish unremembered.
