I grew up in the Kolkata of the early 2000s. This was a time when e-books were a distant figment of imagination, and doomscrolling would most likely be mistaken as doomsday. This meant that for a curious, bibliophile child like me, always ready to hear new bedtime stories, my sole resort were my grandparents. My Dadu (paternal grandfather) was a living, breathing testimony of the history of modern Bengal. He had witnessed the Second World War, saw Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi at a rally in the 1930s, lived through the Direct Action Day of 1946, stood on the balcony of his ancestral home as refugees from then West Pakistan streamed into Calcutta on August 15, 1947. Most of the stories he told us were lived experiences or tales of freedom fighters from undivided Bengal.So vivid were his tales that it made Surjya Sen, the leader of the 1930 Chittagong Uprising, almost sound like a distant cousin. The long passages he quoted solely relying on memory were part of the barrister (and later, leader of the Swaraj Party) Chittaranjan Das’s speech when he defended Aurobindo Ghosh during the Alipore bomb case trials of 1908. These tales made history a living, breathing experience, in contrast to how history was taught in school: a litany of names, places, years. Added to that, a lot of these stories never featured in my ICSE school history textbook up until high school. In the rare occasions that they did, they were reduced to the biographies of people whose lives seemed so far away from ours: historical figures who were put on a pedestal and worshipped as heroes. Heroes they were, but so often it was forgotten that they were people just like us: young men and women with their hopes, dreams and tales of love and loss. My grandfather’s tales of these characters as part of my bedtime stories or ‘golpo bola’ ingrained in me a love for history in a way my school textbooks could never do.Golpo bola is the Bengali phase that literally translates to ‘storytelling’. For me it was ‘Itihasher golpo bola’ or telling stories from history. This tradition of passing down tales of the community orally by the elderly relatives has been on one of the little things that has prevented generations of Bengalis from forgetting their own history. The ‘Golpo bola’ could take place anywhere: at the terrace during the torrid summer evenings or tucked inside a blanket on a winter afternoon as the lingering ray of the dying December sun filtered in through the curtains.These tales served as a fine, invisible thread connecting generations, through the invoking of memories of an era gone by and strengthened bonds between the young and the old. It passed on the tales reiterating the bravado of unsung heroes and kept them alive, transcending the cacophony of politics and collective amnesia of educators, and made the stories quintessentially personal. In one of the tales of Khudiram Bose, my Dadu would repeatedly refer to him as ‘that 19-year-old boy’ hanged by the British for daring to take on the empire. In that moment, it seemed that he was talking about somebody he knew intimately, perhaps a neighbour’s son. Yes, the retelling of historical narratives would be imbued with empathy, tinged with nostalgia and draped in a love for one’s nation and history. Golpo bola about patriotism, without relegating it into the realm of chest-thumping, loud public display of aggressive nationalism. With the death of my Dadu, I realised that we are gradually losing a generation that engaged in ‘golpo bola’.Of all the little things we are losing as a community, this tradition of orally passing down historical tales has been one among the many. Perhaps, it was this love for storytelling and need to preserve the tales of ordinary people with extraordinary courage that I along with my friend Shriya started Agnijug Archive, an oral history project aimed at digitally documenting the tales of Indian freedom fighters. We interviewed the descendants of more than 100 Indian revolutionaries. On our story hunting spree, we heard the tales of Badal Gupta’s last goodbye to his sister. The 18-year-old Gupta was one of Benoy-Badal-Dinesh trio that attacked the Writer’s Building on December 8, 1930. We heard Jatindranath Mukherjee’s (popularly known as Bagha Jatin) granddaughter talking about the ordeal Mukherjee’s young wife and three children had to endure when Bagha Jatin was killed by the British during a gun fight in 1915.This was the tale of my attempt to save ‘Golpo bola’ from the brink of extinction in my own little way, the lost little verb that once permeated into the collective consciousness of a community and passed on its history from one generation to another.Oyeshi Ganguly is a junior manager at the Berlin-based environmental NGO Renewables Grid Initiative. She is a sustainability consultant by profession and an oral historian by passion. She is the founder of Agnijug Archive, an oral history project that engages in digitally documenting, preserving and sharing oral histories of the Indian revolutionaries and the anti-colonial resistance that they espoused between 1900-1947.We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.