A “Restful” Sunday

I finally did something with my Sunday!  Couldn’t sleep all night so stayed up watching this pretty decent movie called ‘Le Grand Voyage’ and then went sight seeing early morning with my mum!

I was still up when my mum woke up and seeing that I wasn’t going to get any sleep for a while, we decided to take advantage of this time and do something we’ve been planning for a while. I’ve mentioned in a previous post about how I’ve always wanted to explore Delhi a bit more but I’ve never gotten around to doing it. Well today I did! Everyone’s seen the Red Fort, Qutub Minar and the other famous ones but the lesser known ones tend to go unnoticed even though they are just as interesting. I must have passed the Tughlaqabad Fort a hundred times, but I never really noticed it really. Mum had taken some Australian guests there recently so we decided we’d go there and explore it properly today.

It was 7 AM so there was no one else around when we arrived other than a few monkeys. Now one thing I forgot to mention was that the reason Mum was excited about going was that she’s recently discovered photography and fancies herself to be the next Prahlad Kakkar (he’s a photographer right? If not, think of any other famous photographer) To cut a long story short, I bought her a new Nokia phone sometime back with a pretty decent camera and since then she takes that thing everywhere she goes and takes photos of everything under the sun. Really. She’s managed to learn to use Flickr and some new Adobe photosharing thing and is planning to start a photoblog (Though sending a simple e-mail she needs us to do coz she ’can’t figure it out’ or so she says. I say its laziness, plain and simple.) So she wanted to take pictures, I wanted to explore. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, fancying ourselves as adventuresses and all when we saw some monkeys outside the fort and mum decided to take some close up photos. We inched our way towards this one monkey and mum just began to take some photos when he decided he didn’t want to model for us anymore. He bared his teeth and starts to move threateningly towards us, making sounds that only be described as growling. I screamed, Mum decided it was a good photo opportunity. I had to push her out of there before he got some of his monkey friends to beat up the intruding tourists.

Anyway, we decided to begin with the mausoleum across the street so that the monkey would have time to get over his little hissy fit. It was pretty interesting. This old guide who happened to be there despite the unearthly hour showed us around and though I don’t know how much he really knew about the place and how much he was making up, it was still a pretty interesting visit. What I found amusing yet sad though was when he took us to this small grave that was set apart from the others and said it belonged to Ghias Ud Din Tughlaq’s dog. They’d always assumed it belonged to a child and thats what the guides had been telling all the tourists for years but recently they’d read in a tourist book that a foreigner had got with her, that it was really the grave of a dog. So basically the guides at the fort needed a tourist book to tell them about the fort, and there was little or no real research involved. Its sad how we have these amazing pieces of history everywhere in India but there is such little concern for them that foreigners have to come and tell us about their origin.

Anyway, after that we went back to the fort itself, with another guide this time. Kept a sharp lookout for the monkeys but according to the guide they’d retired to the nearing forest area by then coz of the heat. So mum was able to take as many photos as she wanted without disturbing the animals there who were really not very friendly. She must have chased countless parrots and monkeys but they all refused to pose properly for a good picture. Anyway, the fort itself was quite interesting. A lot of excavation is still going on and apparently the government is doing it in phases. Everytime they have some money to spare they resume the work, and when the money runs out, they stop mid way till some more comes in. Sad really. What was worse was that they are using pinkish cement to strengthen the existing structures and as a result the original colour of many of the buildings seems to have changed. I bet another 100 years later, people will think the fort was originally pink and have a perfectly good explanation about why it was built so. Like the the Tughlaks were very friendly with the Rajasthani kings and ordered it specially from Jaipur or something. Sheesh!

Anyway, it was a pretty good trip and well worth missing out on some sleep. The poor guide was being extremely nice to us coz he assumed that we were tourists from somewhere else and mum let him believe it. But when mum was taking some photos somewhere, he asked me where we were from, and I couldn’t make up anything at the spot so after some ‘hmm, kya, umm’ I said Delhi. He wasn’t as friendly after that which was not really fair! We should’ve put on a french accent, bet he would’ve thought us important then!

Anyway, gonna be doing this a lot more. I’ve been reading the City of Djinns and I want to visit every single place Dalyrymple talks about (except the eunuchs place actually). I should’ve been a historian or an archaeologist. If only you could get a bit more money out of it:( Would’ve been so much fun! I’ll probably do something like that once I’ve become a millionaire and retired by the age of 30. Till then these short trips and reading up will have to do I suppose! 

 Mum’s version