Ahmedabad Doctor Turns His House Into A Private Museum

A paediatric surgeon, Dr Tejas Naik, from Ahmedabad, has gathered nearly 8,000 artefacts and antiques over three decades and has turned his house into a private museum. Antique lamps, music records, floppy disks, ancient fossils, rare coins, and countless relics fill its rooms and corridors, each carrying a story from another era. The collection is spread across five rooms and organised into 60 subjects, offering visitors a rare glimpse into centuries of history.Dr Tejas Naik said, "The collection kept growing and growing -it became 100 items, then 500, then 2,000. After that, I started dividing them into different subjects and arranging them accordingly. Initially, everything was kept in a cupboard, but later I took them out and began displaying them on the walls of my house. This is how it gradually expanded, and now we live amidst this collection, which brings its own joy."What began as a childhood hobby of collecting sweet wrappers and coins has, over nearly three decades, grown into a vast collection of artefacts, each with its own place in history.He said that from box cameras and spy cameras to gramophones, these artefacts offer a glimpse into worlds long gone. Gramophones and storytelling devices are among my favourite subjects, as they helped in getting information, communicating with people and sharing stories before television came", he added."Another fascinating subject in my collection is what he calls 'subterfuge', which means deception--- something that appears to be one thing but is actually something else. I have a collection dedicated to this theme, containing around 30 to 40 such objects."For Dr Naik, a few hold a deeply personal significance as it belongs to his late grandfather, former Prime Minister Gulzarilal Nanda, that displays Gulzarilal Nanda's Bharat Ratna and Padma Vibhushan medals and letters written by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.What began as a childhood hobby has grown into a living archive, a family home transformed into a repository of history, culture and memory. As each artefact continues to tell its story, the collection stands as a bridge between generations, preserving the past for those yet to discover it.Dr Tejas hopes the collection will one day reach a wider audience, where it can be better preserved and appreciated by many more people.