The only white Taj Mahal I have ever seen was a sketch in a 3rd Standard (Class 3) history book. I envy the author who saw “..the most beautiful building in the world set in pure white marble”.
Apart from the verses written all over the Taj, you could find news about Rajesh loving Zubina, Suresh’s love for Puja and that Zakir would be dead without Karishma. Witness an educated NRI howling at the top of his voice “Hello.. My name is Arvind…” inside the Mahal. Bet that his excellency would have been delighted to hear those echoes inside his grave.
The picnic would have been incomplete without a Lay’s packet being smuggled into the building and being spread open – accidentally – on the ground. The chips were further battered into pieces by people walking on them and some even taking pleasure to play a game of “Hah, I footballed those pieces at your legs”.
Why should you, then, go there? Imagine this – there’s a 400+ year old structure, costing more than $100 billion in asset value and it would go down in the very near future. Would you miss a chance to rub your hands all over the inside of it and have a royal picnic hangout with your buddies who would help you in eve-teasing foreigners? Come on, you would surely not miss trying to scratch some marble out of it as a souvenier – or just to prove to your family that it really is Iranian marble (after all, you have a doctorate in geology and Taj Mahal is an excellent experimentation device).
This is the case with all the monuments all over India. I remember love proclamations written all over Golconda fort when I had visited the place on a school trip.
This is what people were shouting when all the, so called, polluting factories within 40 KM Radius of Taj Mahal were shutting down by Govt orders back in early 90s.
@Abhinav: Gosh! That is a classic example of how people get used to something they have and take it for granted. “Ghar ki murgi dal barabar..” (Chicken from your own house would always taste like lentil soup..)
@Shivani: You should come to Lucknow once to see the Imam Bara (house of the cleric) there. More than the Imam Bara, what is interesting is the fight between two groups that goes on in writing on the walls of the Bara. The practice was never banned until late 2004 and people from “two” groups used to post comments like we are doing here on this blog. Some place to write your views. ;)