Opening story

I recently went to a few places in India, that are the stuff of folklore. Most Indians have been to these two places : Agra, and Varanasi. It was my first time there, and I had a sense of wonder about it beforehand. I mean I knew what to expect, a massive white marble monument of love and the endless surreal ghats of varanasi; but the prospect of actually being in the midst of some of the definitions of India injected a sense of belonging to this country. Expectations are one dimensional : if something is better than what you expect, it has been surpassed. But what if you never really had the imagination to expect what you eventually see? So my expectations were surpassed, to say the least.

It is said that you shouldn't see the Taj as you're walking in through its gate. You should look down as you walk in, and lift your eyes when you finally get to the edge of the platform right before the Taj, to build up the awe factor once you get to it. I'm told it works well. I had a slightly different introduction to it. The first morning I was there, my brother-in-law and I went down to Mehtab Bagh, on the other side of the Yamuna. It was pitch dark and we were swimming in fog. We could see that the river was quite dry. So i lugged by tripod on my shoulder and jumped form river island to river island, waiting to see the Taj when the fog lifted. When it did lift, I was quite blown away and this is what I saw :