This is not about the rampant construction we are seeing in our cities.
For last 2 months, I have been travelling and visiting places of historical importance in Karnataka, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. It looks like someone has been watching my itinerary and putting efforts to foil all my trips. Wherever I go, the monuments were wrapped up in bamboo poles for restoration work. It first started with the Bhoothanatha temple in Badami.
Then it was Amber Fort in Jaipur.
And yet another famous structure in Jaipur – Hawa Mahal.
Another one again in the south – the gigantic gopuras of Madurai.
The job of these champions was not all that easy in Madurai though. There are more than a dozen towers, each scaling higher than the other. They still worked hard to finish mounting those poles before I arrived. As you can see, there is some work left at the top. And in a few of those dozen or so towers, they had managed to cover only halfway.
Fortunately, this will be all, since I have no more monument trip planned in near future. By the time I get out again on the heritage trail, I hope anything that needs to be repaired would be already repaired. 🙂
I have been reading Dalrymple’s City of Djinns right now, and can’t help but wonder how nicely written it is. Besides being a good book, the amount of homework and research he has done for the it becomes fairly obvious as I go through the pages. Sometimes, I did wonder how he can recollect some of the fine details. I got the answer to it today, as I stumbled upon Dalrymple’s say on taking notes.
It’s absolutely vital to have a notebook in your hands at all times, and to scribble constantly, not so much full sentences as lists of significant detail: the colour of a hillside, the shape of a tulip, the way a particular tree haunts a skyline. Creating the finely-crafted prose comes later, back at home in front of the computer. On the road – even in a rickety bus or a bumpy jeep – the key is to get down the raw material before it’s lost to memory.
Read the full article on travel writing by William Dalrymple here.
I was gallivanting on the internet reading some travel writing when I stumbled upon a few award winning write-ups. Interestingly, the awards had a ‘Bad Trip Category’ on the journeys that have gone bad. It was something new to me and caught my eye, and I ended up reading a couple of those stories. Indeed, these were well written pieces that were on travels that were eventually not-so-enjoyable. The story on Eiffel Tower is worth a read, and there are a few more.
In fact the Eiffel Tower story is a rather sad one, but sometimes bad experiences can make into hilarious reading, especially when they are harmless incidences like having to live up to a rat walking on your body in the middle of the night in your hotel or having to live with frequent visits to restroom for a day or two. And when it comes to such writings, it is Mark Moxon whom I remember. Read his stories on falling sick in Rajasthan or trying to find a seat on the train from Siliguri to Varanasi and you can’t help but see yourself laughing out. Moxon’s site is full of writings that is often funny and also insightful. Do take a look.