If this is love, then none of us have ever loved so fully and completely. I implore you all to stop clapping at brags of 50 years of marriage, or trite wedding vows with promises to stay together forever, or sappy romance flicks where the guy and girl are finally in the right place at the right time. Do not spend one more moment telling your loved ones that you love them more than anyone has loved anyone else, because you are wrong.
I say this with the most clear head, heart, and eyes I have ever had:
The Taj Mahal is the most magnificent thing in the world.
I recommend that you all book your tickets, leave your homes, and go see it right now. In fact, if anyone does book a ticket, I will pay your entry fee to see this, the most magnificent wonder of the world. That is a promise. Comment below and I will send you the money.
Because I know many of you may never see this in person, I am going to go through this in slow excruciating detail. I think the story adds so much to the building and the building is so unbelievably fantastic that to do anything else would rob it of the grandeur it deserves.
Have you ever had a friend that says “Go see this movie! It’s the greatest thing ever!” And then time after time you walk into the theater with high hopes only to be disappointed. The gardens at babylon are unimpressive when it is dry and the Great Pyramids of Giza are smaller than you expect them to be. But the Taj Mahal has never and will never disappoint. As many times as you will hear how great it is, it will never be enough. It is impossible to put into words or pictures how utterly flawless this building is, but I will do my best.
In 1631, Mumtaz Mahal, the third wife of King Jahan died. Of the four wives he had, Mumtaz Mahal was his favorite. It was said that the two were inseparable and whatever Jahan felt for his family, friends, and other wives, he felt “a thousand times stronger” for Mumtaz. The other three women never bore Jahan a single child, but Mumtaz bore him 14 in 18 years and died during childbirth. One year later, in 1632, he commissioned a monument and mausoleum to be built in her honor.
The Taj Mahal took 22 years and 20,000 people to build. It is designed around very simple elements of symmetry and balance, but is done so in such an elegant and laborious way that it could never be repeated.
The main dome is 30 meters in diameter on the outside and the building is roughly 50 meters tall. The Taj Mahal is made of local marble from Rajasthan and each piece traveled at least 300 km to make it to the building. The Structure cost over 32 Million rupees to build, an astronomical amount in today’s terms. From a distance, the marvel of the building is its size and iconic structure, but up close you can see more of the details.
Little did I know, but I have been following the trail of the architect who designed the Taj. A turkish man that was originally responsible for the Blue Mosque (hence their similar looks) and who later on a visit to Udaipur, India where he saw the lake palace was inspired to design a similar building using the same white dome structure.
The precise geometry can be seen from a glance. Without context it is impossible to know what side of the building you are standing on due to the flawless symmetry. 4 stone pillars are erected at each corner and are tilted slightly (2 degrees to be exact) away from the building so that in case of an earthquake, the central mausoleum is not damaged. The Building is flanked by three gates that in any other city would be monuments in their own right. The south gate features 22 domes representing the 22 years it took to build the Taj Mahal. The West gate is used as a mosque on fridays and the East Gate as a vantage point for photography and viewing of the Taj at sunset.
Upon closer inspection, the building is elegantly decorated with flowers and arabic text. Running along side the door is calligraphy that gets larger as it gets farther away, so that no matter where you stand it is entirely legible and looks to be about the same size.
On each wall rests one single 6 inch deep 12 sq ft slab of marble with different flowers intricately carved into each one. And while these marble carvings are beautiful, they pale in comparison to the colored flora that decorate each and every part of this building.
Paint fades but these colored flowers never will because each one is not painted or drawn on, it is composed of multiple gemstones inlaid into the marble. That’s right, each red flower is made of rubies, connected by green ivy made of jade, to lapis lazuli buds, or ochre, amethyst, or sapphire petals. None of these stones are native to the area so they have all been imported from China, Belgium, Italy, Egypt, and the like. Even the arabic text adorning the doorways is not drawn on, it is rare black marble from the middle east, once again inlaid into the white Rajasthani marble.
All of this is splendid but it comes together perfectly on the inside where the king and his queen rest side by side in the center of this beautiful monument. The outer walls are decorated with flowers and a gate made of marble is all that separates you from the royalty enclosed within. Lotuses adorn the inner wall, each made up of 64 individual rubies, carved, polished, and laid to perfectly balance the mausoleum.
The greatest beauty is that it is not the king, but the queen who sits in the center of the Taj Mahal. In fact, if you stand at the back and look through the marble walls to her tomb, you can see a perfectly straight line over her casket and through the south gate. It is from her perspective that the symmetry exists. As if King Jahan, wanted to put her at the center of her own universe where everything revolved around her. In fact, his casket is laid beside hers on an elevated platform and is the one non-symmetrical thing in the Taj Mahal; as if to say that he is the one flaw in all of the perfection that surrounds his queen.
That’s love.
Flawless, beautiful, undying, selfless, painful, tiring, gorgeous, magnificent, powerful, elegant, perfect love.
And that is the Taj Mahal.
Backpack and Boots 
BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU!
Rumor has it that the king had the hands of 27000 workers cut off so they could never make anything as beautiful.