I’m now in New Delhi for the Convergence India conference. Given the flight schedules, I needed to arrive a day before the conference started. This gave me a free day. My neighbor suggested I use the time to visit the Taj Mahal which is about 230 km away. So, I hired a car for the day.
Well, 230 km in India is well over a four hour drive. With an evening meeting, I only had about an hour at the Taj. It was worth it. The Taj simply cannot be appreciated in any photograph.
I do have one observation. There are about a billion people in India. We can assume 500 million of them are male. Based on my observation, at least 5 million of them are peeing at the side of the road at any given instant.
Ha! That wasn’t exactly what I expected to read when I saw your subject heading!
I have long considered the Taj Mahal to be my favorite work of art and I’ve never seen anything but photographs of it. I am pea-green with envy! (Or is that pee-green? )
I wish you a safe and pleasant journey with good food, new friends and adventures.
Lucky. I have been in Pune India for two weeks now and won’t get a chance to get up to the Taj.
I do agree about the peeing on the side of the road. It always seems to happen in clusters too. You’ll see a group of 5-6 guys, then 100 meters or so down the road another cluster.
I saw the Taj Mahal back in '90 in between trekking in Nepal and lounging on the beaches in Thailand. I was expecting to be let down, figuring there was no way it could live up to the hype. Man was I wrong. I was just blown away by its utter architectural perfection. If there’s any structure on the planet that looks more like it’s part of a fairy tale come to life, I haven’t any idea what it might be.
As it happened, while we were in Agra there was some sectarian violence over the mosque in Ayodhya (this was a few years before it was destroyed). To prevent the rioting from spreading, they shut down the trains, and being poor backpackers we weren’t about to hire a car or anything. So, we were stuck in Agra for a couple extra days, and got to see the Taj at sunset, and at sunrise, and so on and so forth. The thing is practically alive, the way it responds to different lighting.
If you’re back in Delhi, try really hard to see Humayun’s Tomb. It’s the first of the series of buildings that ends with the Taj Mahal. It’s been done up a fair bit recently and it’s superb.
It’s only about 30 minutes from central New Delhi by tuk tuk if the traffic’s not too bad.
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