A wonder!
Jun 22, 2007
A blind boy is walking down the street distributing small yellow pamphlets shounting out loudly " मुझे वोट दो".
My first impression was that it was an ad-film made to create awareness about the blind and their ascendency to normal life.
The boy slowly moves his hand over the eaflet and it shows a pencil sketch of the Taj Mahal.
सुना है कि बहुत सुंदर है।
please वोट दिजियेना।
What is it about this national craze, even international media frenzy, that is creating such moving ads? Can a monument made by a lover in memory of his love capture the imagination of a nation like never before? Is it really a national symbol?
A national symbol unites the people in a way that no other can. It is a solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.
Take national anthem, for example, sung on national holidays. No matter how banal the words and the tune we sing it in, there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity. At precisely such moments, people completely unkown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody. The image: resonance, the echoed physical realisation of the one community. How selfless this resonance feels.
Can a monument like the Taj achieve something remotely similar to such a feeling?
Whenever a foriegner thinks of India, he thinks of snake charmers, elephants and the Taj. An international dignitary always takes time off his busy schedule to visit the taj. Its globally acknowledged that the Taj is considered the symbol of love, the ultimate tribute to any human emotion. An edifice that epitomises an expression that is natural to every human being. It is this poignant intercourse of sentiment with marble that sets the Taj apart from any other monument.
The world is in its awe. Poets are praising it, minstrels singing of it, psychologists getting deep about it, boys and girls dreaming of it. Billboards selling it, industries built on it, kings and queens and streetsweepers hot in its pursuit.
This country has one chance to make all this sustain forever. It is this chance to enlist the Taj as one of the new seven wonders of the world. If voting is required to prove its worth, then so be it. We as a nation of a billion should be happy to see the Taj i a place where it actualy belongs.
These are the exact feelings one gets when he thinks of the new seven wonders campaign. This is another such moment when a person wholly unkown to you ponders over the same feelings. He wants his national sysmbol to be respected by the international community.
I have never seen the Taj for real in my life so far.
सुना है कि बहुत सुंदर है।
please वोट दिजियेना
Vote here
or sms TAJ to 4567
Posted bySandeep Sekharamantri at 5:46 PM 3 comments
Labels: hindi, publicity, taj mahal, wonder
