Everyone told me ‘You have to go to the Taj Mahal – it is the most beautiful building on Earth… It is perfection. You won’t believe it. You have to go.’ But I was like, you know, okay, I’ll give it a look while I’m in India.
And then I saw it… Like you saw it! And I couldn’t believe how beautiful it is. I still cannot believe it. It is perfection.
(Saskia, traveler)
I had seen pictures of the Taj Mahal too. I knew what it looked like. I knew it was a major monument of India. But nothing, no, nothing in this world could have prepared me to what I felt in front of it. No description, no picture, no poem or prose, no story can replace the direct, brutal and intense experience of seeing the Taj Mahal with your own eyes.
That was the third time my mind was blown away in India. When I saw the Taj Mahal. Every time I saw it, actually. Every time I found a new spot, a new point of view, a new angle, a new detail, outside, from a field, on the other side of the Yamuna river, from a rooftop restaurant, from the Agra Fort, or, even more, inside the Taj grounds, a few dozens of meters away or close enough to touch its milky-white marble walls.
And the monument in the first picture is not the Taj Mahal, no – actually it is just here to decorate and give balance to the Taj Mahal complex, even though it would be a major monument if it were standing alone in another city – but do not worry, you will have plenty of it in the following, to saturation. Even though no photograph will ever give you the same, powerful and timeless feeling that grasps anyone who sees it for real. No one will take your breath away every single time you look at it, as it does in reality. No one will make you fall on your knees, overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotions pulsing from the tomb.