Forum: Louvre museum heist a wake-up call

I’ve seen photos of the Louvre in textbooks and read about the Mona Lisa and the endless halls lined with art. I always assumed that everything inside was completely safe – locked behind glass, guarded, untouchable.

But the fact that a group of thieves could get in, smash display cases and vanish with centuries-old jewels in just a few minutes shatters that illusion (

Power tool-wielding thieves flee Louvre with ‘priceless’ jewellery

, Oct 19).

It forces us to ask: Are the things we consider priceless truly safe in the places we store them? Or have we grown too comfortable, assuming that glass and lasers are good enough protection?

Maybe the real theft isn’t of the jewels themselves, but of our connection to them.

In a digital world where we scroll past art more than we experience it, maybe we’ve already let our heritage slip away a little.

This heist is a wake-up call. It reminds us that the treasures in our museums are fragile links to who we are and where we’ve come from. As fewer people visit museums and more of our history gets reduced to pixels on a screen, it becomes even more important to protect what’s real and tangible.

We now have to ask ourselves: What does it mean to “preserve” art in an age when everything can be photographed, replicated or generated by artificial intelligence?

The next step is not just tighter security in museums all over the world but also awareness, appreciation, and action for the history and art around us. The real crime would be if we stopped valuing the art that defines us.

Avishi Gurnani, 15
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