We made a day road trip from Jaipur to Ajmer and Pushkar. Ajmer is the home of the beautiful dargah. The place is very unique that people from all faiths and religions visit the place, it has a long history for it has one door built by Ala-ud-din-Khilji and one built by Emperor Jehangir. It was one of the crowded places I have ever visited. I felt the place had an unique energy of its own.
Pushkar boasts of the one and only brahma temple in the world. The temple is quite big and is a temple complex with quite a few smaller temples inside. There is a lake in pushkar but it was pretty dry when we went. The locals claimed lack of rain but my engineering mind said all the canals to fill the lake have been blocked by housing development around the lake.
The next stop was towards Fatehpursikri on the way we stopped at one of the Rajasthan Tourism's hotels and had the best aloo paratha's we had ever had.
Fatehpursikri, as per my remembrance of the history it was part of an effort by emperor Akbar to shift capital from Delhi. There is a beautiful fort in Fatehpur with a mosque in the center. The fort is built with red stone, while the mosque is made from white marble. It appears like a fort from the outside but from the inside it appears as a place to enclose the mosque.
The windows of the mosque are so uniquely designed that from a distance it appears like a sheet of glass than a stone window.
The guide mentioned Akbar's wife Jodha had a small temple in one of the corners of the fort. According to him the below pic is the inverted temple built for Jodha.
The unique feature about the doors in the above pic is that all the doors are of same height but they appear as though the preceding door is smaller than the succeeding door. It is not a photographic gimmick but is built that way.
The fort also has the tunnel through which supposedly Anarkali was smuggled to Lahore and it also houses the graves of lots of near and far relatives of Akbar.
A beautiful place reflecting Mughal architecture but it is so infested with people who claim to be tour guides and photographers that it takes some of the charm away. Supposedly lots of bollywood movies have been shot here.
No comments:
Post a Comment