Touring the Taj Mahal

India is 12 time zones ahead of the United States at a minimum. That guarantees at least 16 hours of travel either on one of the handful of nonstops from the New York and Chicago or using a tried and true connection through Europe, most typically London. In my case it was an add-on following a stop in Hong Kong as part of a business trip to Asia. I knew this would most likely be my one and only time ever to go to India whether on mine or the company's dime so I was surely not about to waste the opportunity. This trip, once my business was taken care of, was all about the Taj Mahal, two hours by train south of Delhi along the river near the city of Agra.

After dealing with the train and working past the abject poverty of the surrounding streets a shockingly reasonable admission ticket provided access to the walled grounds of "the Taj." At the far end of the compound which allows for slack-jawed admirers of all ages and through the ages to stand and gawk at the pearl white features of the main building and the four minarets guarding each corner. Hyperboles have tried and failed to describe the stunning beauty of the creamy structure bathed in blue skies and surrounded by the greens and reds of the land and ground around it. I had the immediate feeling that to take the eye away from one view in favor of another was still to shortchange the whole as literally any vantage point and viewing angle was just as good as the next.

Amateur and professional photographers jockeyed for position to capture that full-front, high gloss National Geographic cover image or to find some rarely shown angle on a nearly 400 year old building. Others on a day tour like me walked lazily around or charged full tilt through the place trying to grab as much of the experience as possible before being called back to the organized tour bus. Being a day tripper on my own my driver-guide gave me as much time as I wanted to explore, find my own angles, use some of his suggestions and explore the more delicate features of the main building.

It's a mausoleum. A graveyard for initially only one person and a personal tribute to one of the greatest love stories of all time. Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the entire complex in 1632 as a burial site for his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to a daughter, the 14th and last child of the Shah. He was later buried there himself, throwing off the symmetry he fought so hard to maintain but since their crypt is in the basement of the main building, that nitpicky little detail isn't noticed above ground and outdoors. Theirs was the love that sustained an empire; the Taj Mahal is said to be second in beauty only to hers.

Balance was the key. Of the two facing mosques only one has a completed interior and serves as a house of worship. The second was built literally and simply to balance the first. It has no other purpose. The reflecting pool allows a mirror image of the whole from the main garden. Inlaid semi-precious stonework and carved reliefs cover much of the exterior surfaces along with a few disturbingly large beehives. While Muslim tradition forbids elaborate decoration of graves it apparently says little about how grand the building above the grave can be.

For a trip to the Taj Mahal, the insurmountable distance, the high heat, sweltering humidity and shocking poverty are worth enduring for the building itself, thankfully, has endured. Security is tight and environmental controls around the complex limit its exposure to pollution which had begun to turn the pure white marble a dull yellow. I was only there for a day trip but would have enjoyed one of the night viewings offered during and around the full moon of every month. Now that would have surely made the cover of National Geographic?!

If you want a better idea of how something this wonderful is possible, view this treat on YouTube and experience "Deliverance," written and performed by Yanni across the Yamuna River with the Taj Mahal in the background in tribute to India's 50th anniversary of independence. It is a personal favorite piece of music while the magnificent setting speaks for itself.

Gotta go.

Birthdays Abroad

Today is a member of the family's 45th birthday. Nothing unusual there, true, but it reminds me, as it should, of the place in time where the blessed event occurred, Stuttgart, Germany. For Americans born overseas most are usually like mine in being part of the United States Armed Forces. Otherwise unassuming and ordinary citizens like my family member always get a double-take when the starter topic of where one was born comes up. Unexpected answers like Korea, Turkey, England and Germany come up followed by the innocent question of "What was it like?" right behind it.

Of course the person being born has zero collection of the event or the conditions of time and place but a small sample of things at the time would include a divided Germany only just recently rebuilt from the Second World War, an escalating Cold War between the NATO powers and the Soviet-backed Warsaw Pact and a Black-American family stationed in a foreign country at the height of the Civil Rights Movement back home in a branch of the service that was integrated only 12 years before.

At one extreme one might say ours was just one family not welcome at home in America, grudgingly tolerated by the service, targeted for elimination by the Soviet opposition and bitterly resented by the citizens of occupied West Germany. It wasn't that bad in truth though the Soviet threat was as real as the confusion back home across the Atlantic. Though it took some time, once the order was given the service, to its credit, followed the orders of integration to the letter and beyond. Civil unrest in the United States military was not tolerated as all families got along well enough to understand we were the only support each other had while overseas, regardless of whatever was going on back home.

The Germans were supportive and friendly as well, appreciating the civilian jobs that came with keeping a multi-national foreign defense force running smoothly and taking every opportunity to share language and cultural exchanges. Getting on and off the military bases around the country generally required a military ID or escort but those checks were very perfunctory, nothing close to the car and body searches required post-9/11. It was generally understood that, welcome or not, military bases, especially American ones, were off-limits as far as demonstrations or terrorist activities.

So now, 45 years later, we are left with the memories of the birth of my family member and certainly do wish them all the best and many happy returns. What we are unable to do these days is actually visit the location where the blessed event occurred. Not only is it in the heart of Southern Germany and a long distance away but the actual facility is no longer a part of the US Military system of hospitals. Access to the housing area we used to live in is also behind high walls with barbed wire and restricted access only.

Sometimes it is exactly the same here in the United States. I was born on a military base here which is now also restricted access only. I've never seen it with my own eyes but from the pictures my parents saved of that place oh so long ago it has most definitely changed from the dusty backwater it once was.

Maybe one day but for now, Happy Birthday, and many happy returns!

Gotta go.

Banned Reading and Wandering

Reading and traveling go hand in hand back to the days of horse-drawn carriages and beyond. What better way to while away the hours than with stimulating light reading, thought provoking prose or some scandal sheet rattling off juicy tidbits no more grounded in truth than water running uphill? For those less traveled it is more often than not the written word along with a few choice photographs that carry us back in time, to distant shores or both.

How sad it is to continue to see such things as lists of banned literature. Age appropriate guidelines I can live with but to have books out and out banned from public consumption, particularly in the school systems is to me the height of the very oppression so many of these concerned and learned factions claim to abhor. Am I more enlightened than any other living soul? Hardly, yet I am certainly no less sensitive to insensitive thought, conjecture or statement. How, then, have I been able to read some of these banned titles where children today are not permitted the same level of diverse reading?

In high school in the late 70s and early 80s I was required to read “The Scarlet Letter,” “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Animal Farm” and “Madame Bovary” among some 50 titles banned in certain parts of the United States . Other titles from that list which I later read of my own volition include “Gone With the Wind,” “Jaws,” “Catch-22” and “Of Mice and Men.” I’m re-reading the “Harry Potter” series from start to finish, all of which are also on the list.

I found “The Scarlet Letter” to be boring and much ado about nothing and I couldn’t understand why pigs were chosen as the overlords of society in “Animal Farm” as opposed to bulls, roosters or any other strutting and preening animal in the barnyard. I enjoyed Bovary’s tale of illicit love while I will always remember my mother and I agreeing to each read 50 pages a piece to each other so we could get through the difficult narrative of “Mockingbird.” Much of the story and symbolism from all of these are long gone and forgotten, honestly, so either they had no impact upon my impressionable mind at the time or they hold no sway over my view of the world today despite any subliminal messages from the writing that might have taken hold.

Then there is “Huckleberry Finn.” Saw the movie, read the book and simply accepted at a young age that such language was part of life at the time it was written. The satire caught with me but the dialogue itself has no bearing on my relationships with others today. Most importantly, at a very young age I saw through all of that to the beauty of the friendship between two fish out of water looking for nothing so complicated as love and acceptance.

I wondered what river boating would be like just as vividly as I raced through the streets of Paris trying to imagine the ultimate fulfillment of unrequited longing or the bittersweet taste of justice served after a needless crime was committed. Then I wonder, like so many others around the world, why in seven installments there was never one mention of an American, Asian or African school of witchcraft and wizardry!

As if there was never that kind of voodoo anywhere outside of Europe ?!

Gotta go.