Taj, Salim and the Birds!

One of the things about working in an MNC is that in the 25th Dec – 1st January week, no one in US, Europe or Asia-Pacific works. The benefit is that no one cares if you too go on vacation in India during this week. For me this translates into good time to take your car and drive down to some interesting location. Now given the condition of my decade old Palio, I only feel safer to venture out to locations within 4-5 hours drive (this is the only time I rue my stubborn-ness for not upgrading my car. To me the car has always been a mode of transport to go from Point A to Point B - nothing more. But things are changing fast and it is getting difficult to keep the ‘peer-pressure’ at bay).

Well, last year it was Jaipur and Neemrana Fort for me. This time we ventured out to Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Bharatpur.







I initially thought this would be a nice shoe-string budget trip but soon realized that if you remove the cost of Airfare, the trip was as expensive as any other holiday!

Reason: In this ‘season’ the hotel rates are alarmingly high, especially in Northern India, where this is the time to ‘make your hay when the sun shines’ (in this case when the sun shines lighter) for service industry. Part that and part recent inflation, I actually felt like I had the ‘Midas touch’ – everything I put my finger on became of gold! So expensive! Even in the road-side truck-wallahs’ dhaba, I could feel money losing its worth pretty fast.

Money aside, the trip with few family members was a memorable one. My Palio kept true and didn’t ditch me even for once. Driving on highways in India is still fun when compared to the lousy cocktail of horrible traffic and crater roads in City.

Here, as an exception, we had only one messy traffic situation on our way back to Delhi (on the Bharatpur-Mathura road). This was one of those roads with traffic running both ways. At one of the bottlenecks, the vehicles from our side became impatient and started moving on to the side which was supposed to be for incoming vehicles . Result? Complete traffic jam!

I was dismayed when one after the other vehicles were passing us and choking the way for incoming traffic – how on earth they thought the traffic would move! But as most of us already know ‘they’ don’t think – ‘they’ just drive. Typical Indian mentality to do first and think later! Interestingly, many a times this ‘they’ include you and me as well! But I liked when all those guys zooming past us were asked to reverse to ease bottleneck. A rare example of justice done on our roads.

Taj was fun. I was visiting it after almost 10 years but was still fascinated by its sheer towering presence, which is majestic, to say the least.



Since we went relatively early in the morning to view Taj, the photographs were not so great as it was still a bit hazy but the good thing was we witnessed the Yamuna completely covered with dense fog and there we were -standing at its bank – seemed like we were in heaven, walking in the clouds.



Like Banaras have Pandas, here you’ll be hassled by govt. certified guides. The guide who got us told me that there were 380 such guides, which explains their behavior. The guide was Muslim and seemed defensive about Shahjahan & Aurangzeb. When I asked is it true that Shahjahan ordered to ‘cut hands’ of the involved masons after Taj was completed, he replied “cutting hands” (Hindi idiom) referred to the contract which he drew with these people that they won’t work on any other project after completing Taj.

Regarding Aurangzeb, his view was that Shahjahan wanted to make a black Taj as well and he ordered to collect hefty taxes for the same – that’s when Aurangzeb intervened and arrested him for people’s sake. That is so much about history –many versions – who knows which is true!

I told the guide that we weren’t interested in his ramble on smaller details, as we were here for sheer fun and were more interested in clicking photographs than to follow his stories. To my surprise, he was adamant that we listen to all that he had to say. It was such an obsessive-compulsive behavior.

This in fact reminded me of my days as ‘Medical Representative’ where the criteria of a successful doctor call was to make the doctor listen to our entire parroted ‘detailing story’, even if it meant either him looking at his watch all the time or was yawning his way to glory! Similar guide behavior was repeated at Fatehpur Sikri.

The bird sanctuary at Koleodeo National park was a pleasant surprise. It is nicely tucked in a village-like sleepy outskirts of Bharatpur . A long pukka road cuts through the natural winter habitat of birds from all over the world. Cycling on that road and enjoying the flora and fauna on both sides was very satisfying.



Locals say that once there came a cow which made her home under a banana tree and secreted milk even without ‘milking’. The Raja asked to dig the banana tree to get to the base of such miracle and found a Shivling - hence the name Koleodeo. Koleo for banana tree and deo for the Shivling.

Here are few snaps which I took from my ordinary Sony Cybershot camera (can’t tell how much I missed a good camera with big zoom):

















Would you believe that the birds here can paint as well? Here is a picture of two trees painted white by these birds:



By now you would have probably guessed how they painted it (what else -the mighty bird shit!)

The only thorn in the flesh was a proud official stone which engraved the exploits of mighty shikari people (of the likes of Lord Curzon, Lord Harding or Chelmsford etc.), who killed thousands of innocent bird for showcasing their might or for the sake of creating records.



I am no vegetarian and can understand if birds are killed to be eaten. But for record's sake killing more than 4000 birds in a single day! Atrocious, to say the least. But then everything is so relative. There would many of you who would despise killing of birds even for food!

Either ways, it was an intervention of none other than the ‘birdman of India’ Salim Ali, which helped putting a ban on the killing of birds here and creating the bird sanctuary, which now is a UNESCO world heritage site.



I conclude my blog piece with his words:

“it is true that I despise purposeless killing, and regard it as an act of vandalism, deserving the severest condemnation. But my love for birds is not of the sentimental variety. It is essentially aesthetic and scientific…. for a scientific approach to bird study, it is often necessary to sacrifice a few, ... (and) I have no doubt that but for the methodical collecting of specimens in my earlier years - several thousands, alas - it would have been impossible to advance our taxonomical knowledge of Indian birds ...”— Ali (1985)