15 stops to Nice

This is Defence Colony in Dehli where we are staying. It is a nice quartier with little restaurants and it is quiet in our airbnb. We went th the Red Fort and the National Museum.  We saw the saturday strollers out en masse.  The same beautiful inlaid marble and geometrical waterways here as in Agra.  The floral art is splendid. Shah Jahan lived here for part of his reign. Afterwards we went to the Myseum.  I had studied Indian art at the Louvre in Paris and was happy to finally see some of the most emblematic works of the area.  These clay figures are from The Indus Valley civilization.  They are so caricatured. This is around 3000 BC. The bronzes were also very fine.  The “nataragas”. very much influenced my effigies series way back when. This is Janhangir, he was a very tolerant Muslim leader and the Jesuits were in town so here he is holding a portrait of the Madonna. In this museum I could really get within 1 inch of the miniatures ! Vishnu in sto...

 I’ve always wanted to see the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, astronomical instruments to view celestial events.  But I didn’t realize the palaces here were so beautiful and extensive.  The fort above is perched on a hill with a fortress wall that surrounds it a little like a “Great wall of China”.  The city of Jaipur is called the “Pink City” because most of it was painted pink by à mataraja of the late 19th cen.  To get here we had to suffer the Indian highways which are calculated chaos.  Holy cows directing traffic , tuc tucs at every angle, a mess.  The lines on the road don’t mean anything the horn rules.  They don’t use their rear view mirrors because they are so busy looking at what’s happening in front of them so they all have signs on the back “blow horn” so they know you are in back of them. It seems the cows get high on the exhaust of cars that’s why they hang out near highways. We stopped along the way at a baoli or step well. I met these t...

Architecture must be experienced so here is entry to the Taj Mahal in the morning. must be experienced I have again no way of changing the sequence of these photos without losing most of them. This is one of the towers at the corner of the Taj Mahal. It’s really incredible that they are so perfectly pristine after all these years.  It is a beautiful story. She Mumtaz Mahal was a childhood friend of Shah Jahan and they were about the same age. She gave him 14 children and died at the age of 38. If you do the math, most of her married life she was pregnant but then only 6 of her children survived.  Shah Jahan was devastated at her death after the 14 th child and made this mausoleum to her.  He later in life wanted to make a black Taj across the river for himself but his 3rd son wasn’t having it and cut off his two elder brothers heads and imprisoned his father Shah Jahan.  Aurangzeb became the new emporeur.  So goes it. Here below is a detail of the beautiful marb...