A walk through the school's museum of science models

On a quiet stretch of road in Baranagore, just north of Kolkata, the Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School keeps a small room that students, teachers and visiting parents have come to regard as something of a treasure house. The museum of science models sits on the ground floor of the main building, tucked between the library and the laboratory, and it holds working models, diagrams and specimen trays that span physics, chemistry, biology and the everyday mechanics of rural life. For alumni scattered across cities from Sydney to Perth, a return to this room often becomes the most vivid memory of a school day that otherwise might have blurred into a list of textbooks and exam papers.

The collection has grown over decades through the quiet labour of science teachers and curious students. Many of the earliest pieces were assembled from scrap wood, repurposed tin and bicycle parts salvaged from local workshops, a tradition that continues today. The alumni committee has, in recent years, helped fund new acquisitions, restored older models and even commissioned a small number of digital exhibits that pair physical contraptions with tablet-based explanations. A walk through the gallery today feels less like a tour of the past and more like a layered record of how a generation of Indian schoolchildren learned to look at the world around them.

For alumni now living in Australia, the museum offers a familiar kind of wonder that may echo visits to Questacon in Canberra, Scienceworks in Melbourne or the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Australian schools have long promoted hands-on science learning, and the national curriculum overseen by ACARA places considerable weight on inquiry-based investigation in the primary and secondary years. Walking past a model water turbine built by a 1970s student, a Sydney-based engineer might recall an excursion in primary school; a Brisbane teacher might see a teaching tool she could adapt for her own Year 8 physics class. The shared language of model-making bridges hemispheres with surprising ease.

A visit to the museum is also woven into the wider life of the alumni network. Reunion tours often pause here, and the alumni members portal lists the gallery as one of the recommended stops on a heritage walk. For those who cannot travel back in person, the committee has been collecting photographs, short videos and oral histories that are slowly being uploaded to the site's archive, so a desktop visitor can still wander the cases from the stands.

The first room you step into

The museum opens off a courtyard shaded by two old neem trees, and the wooden door has been refinished so many times that the grain is almost silver. Visitors are greeted by a large painted sign that lists the gallery's house rules in three languages, and a small donations box that helps fund the annual restoration of the most fragile pieces. Inside, the room smells faintly of linseed oil and old paper, and the first thing the eye notices is the height of the ceiling, unusually generous for a school building of this size.

The gallery is arranged in three loose zones that follow the sequence of the school's science syllabus. Mechanics sit nearest the entrance, life sciences occupy the centre, and chemistry gathers the model to its display cases by the far wall. A central aisle runs the length of the room, wide enough for a class of forty students to file past in pairs, and the floor tiles are a patchwork of replacements that reflect decades of small repairs. The visual effect is of a working space rather than a polished museum, and that quality is part of its appeal to returning alumni.

For visitors from Australia, the gallery often recalls the more hands-on corners of the Australian Museum in Sydney or the smaller regional science centres that dot the country. There is a deliberate absence of glass barriers between most exhibits, a choice that aligns with how the national STEM school education strategy encourages tactile engagement with scientific objects. A Year 7 student from a Brisbane school might handle a model the same way she would during an outreach workshop at a suburban library, while a retired engineer from Adelaide might find himself crouching to examine the casters on an old trolley.

Glass cases and wooden gears

The mechanics aisle is dominated by a row of wooden pulleys, lever arms and inclined ramps beneath hand-lettered Bengali labels, each one paired with an English translation added during a 1990s refurbishment. The models are robust enough that younger children can pull cords, lift counterweights and feel the resistance of a hand-cranked winch. Many visitors spend their first ten minutes here simply re-learning the principles they once memorised for a Class 8 exam, only this time with the unhurried pleasure of an adult.

A working model of a hydel power generator stands at the corner of the aisle, built originally to demonstrate how falling water can spin a turbine. It is connected to a small light bulb that flickers on whenever the model is cranked, and it still draws a crowd during reunion visits. For alumni working in renewable energy across Australia, where the Clean Energy Regulator tracks the country's transition towards lower emissions, the humble exhibit offers an oddly personal connection to conversations about turbines and grid demand that play out in policy meetings in Canberra.

Further along, a Foucault-style pendulum hangs from a brass fixture that has been polished more times than anyone can count. The pendulum is small by international standards, but its slow swing across a sanded disc is enough to spark the same hushed attention found in larger Australian science centres. The display is paired with a painted mural of the Earth's rotation that has been touched up by successive batches of student artists, each leaving their signature year in a discreet corner.

Life under the bell jars

The biology section occupies the back half of the gallery and is arranged around a row of tall glass bell jars, the kind that once sat on pharmacy counters in the nineteenth century. Inside each jar sits a model: a cross-section of a human heart with red and blue chambers, a magnified flower with removable petals, a mosquito whose proboscis extends on a tiny brass hinge. The models were crafted by a biology teacher who retired in the early 2000s and whose family donated additional specimens after his passing.

Along one wall hangs a long painted chart of the human digestive system, drawn freehand by a 1986 graduate who later trained as a medical illustrator in Mumbai. Her chart, which includes small marginal sketches of dietary advice in both Bengali and English, has become a quiet favourite of younger students preparing for medical entrance exams. Alumni who have moved into healthcare roles across Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin often mention the chart in their reunion notes, and a few have asked whether a high-resolution scan might be shared with Australian medical educators who teach anatomy using similar visual aids.

A set of botanical models sits beside the digestive chart, depicting common crops of the Bengal delta: rice plants at three stages of growth, jute stems with their fibrous bark exposed, and a row of pondweed that nods to the region's aquaculture. The models are not glamorous, but they are accurate, and they remind visitors that science teaching in the school has always been tied to the agricultural rhythms of the surrounding countryside.

The chemistry corner and the periodic wall

The chemistry corner occupies the eastern wall of the museum, and it is dominated by a hand-painted periodic table that stretches nearly six metres wide. Each element square carries a small hand-drawn icon representing a common use: a copper wire, a silicon chip, a gold ring, a small loaf of bread for carbon. The wall was painted in 1998 by a team of final-year students and has been retouched twice since. It is the kind of display that a student might glance at a hundred times during school, only to appreciate fully once they have begun a career in materials science, pharmacy or engineering.

Below the periodic wall sit several molecular models assembled from painted wooden balls and short rods. Water, methane, benzene and a longer-chain hydrocarbon stand in a row, and a tray of spare atoms allows visitors to construct new molecules on the spot. This invitation to tinker reflects a teaching philosophy shared by many Australian schools, where the national STEM school education strategy encourages hands-on engagement over rote memorisation. A Melbourne-based chemist visiting the museum with her parents found herself explaining the geometry of methane to a curious eight-year-old, in much the same way she might during a school outreach session at a suburban primary.

At the far end of the chemistry corner, a small display honours former students who went on to careers in science. Photographs, short biographies and, where the family has provided one, a piece of original research sit together in a single cabinet. The cabinet is modest in size but rich in detail, and it speaks to the way the school has long tracked the journeys of its graduates.

What alumni carry home

A walk through the museum rarely ends at the exit. Alumni tend to linger at the photographs, swap stories about which model they remember most clearly, and occasionally volunteer to sponsor the restoration of a particular piece. The committee channels that enthusiasm into a rotating list of maintenance projects, and updates on completed work are shared through the alumni site, including the principal's message about the museum's role in school life.

For Australians in the diaspora, the museum also serves as a quiet anchor to a shared past. Conversations about it often come up during informal gatherings at community halls in Parramatta, in the cafes of Brunswick, or at the annual science fair stalls run by alumni associations in Perth and Brisbane. The models themselves become a kind of portable nostalgia, easy to describe over coffee and easy to recognise from photographs shared in alumni group chats.

The committee's broader mission, which includes supporting meritorious students through scholarships and running a local study centre, is gently visible in the museum as well. A small donation box sits near the entrance, and the funds raised help maintain the collection and subsidise visits from schools that cannot afford the bus fare. It is a modest operation, but it reflects the same spirit that built the models in the first place: a belief that careful observation and a little patience can turn scrap materials into something genuinely instructive.

Those who return to the school after many years often describe the museum as one of the rooms that has changed least, even as the surrounding neighbourhood has grown busier and the curriculum has shifted. The familiar creak of the hydel model, the painted periodic wall and the bell jars of biological specimens offer a continuity that is rare in institutions of any size. For alumni balancing careers, families and the demands of life across two hemispheres, that continuity is a small but reliable gift.