I have learnt in my high school biology that cockroaches and some other creatures have white blood. But let me tell you, human beings can also have white blood. What if a man is stabbed and the redness of the blood made white through some intelligent optical manipulation? If that is done on every person stabbed (and possibly announced in CNN or BBC) the world will slowly start believing that blood is white. Is it not?
And there was an emperor in
Ok, let me end this rhetoric here….That emperor was none else than Shah Jahan, who amputated the hands of some 20,000 workers, who constructed his ‘white building’, called the Taj Mahal. This is the monument which declared that human blood could be white. Some historians (probably the western historians who first elevated this white building with a criminal background, to one of the seven wonders of the world) advocate that Shah Jahan cut only the main mason’s hand(s) of; that too his right hand alone. Hmm…what an intelligent consolation!
Anyways, even I don’t know the truth. Regardless of the quantity of hands, I ought to believe this widely known fact. I can’t afford to make myself disbelieve this genocide just because the world around me cherishes the Taj as the ostentatious archetype of love.
For me, this is a brutal tragedy; a red-handed truth of human massacre; a totally unnecessary and very much avoidable killing, just executed for the sadistic advantage of petty human ego and selfishness. Added to that comes the colossal loss of the rich artistic and cultural heritage of that time, through the elimination of those artists. None of the history text books known to man might mention this; for the history is just a story written and publicized by the powerful and the successful.
The Taj is not the symbol of love; but of the vicious annihilation of love; for, love by any definition means, not the self centered love constrained to the familial boundaries comprising of one’s wife, children or to a few selected people within the limited range of one’s perception. To love a wife and to murder (yes cutting the hands is equivalent to murder, to me and I am sure that most of them would have just perished; because they wouldn’t have been able to work without their two hands to find enough food to keep themselves alive!!!) 20,000 others, for the selfish (which is often portrayed as the greatest and unique merit of Taj Mahal!!!) motive of maintaining the uniqueness of the Taj is the greatest atrocity in disguise, I can ever manage to find in the history of mankind, I have known about.
For me, Shah Jahan was just a brutal murderer and a cold-blooded perpetrator of human genocide, who doesn’t hold the minimal eligibility to be presented by the history as the magnanimous constructor of the marble monument epitomizing human love. It is one of the biggest faults of the Indian and the world history to have not demoted the name of that person to the notorious list comprising of Hitler, Idi Amin, Narendra Modi and the infinite others. And it is one of the biggest ironies in the behavioral history of human beings that, the world enjoys and glorifies the whiteness of this monument and consciously or ignorantly shut their eyes and heart towards the red-naked truth of the blood that would have covered the entire Agra, when the 40,000 hands, trembled with their last life and played the rhythm of the most horrible form of death. But the avalanche of their tears would have swept the lava of their blood away, facilitating the hands of power to imprint their euphoric stories about the Taj onto the minds of the insensitive and illiterate world outside; a world which can function only on the stories of the powerful and the successful; a world of human beings whose existence itself is a quintessential function of the gallons of blood shed since the advent of mankind. Yes, this ‘bloody’ Mahal will cast its cruel white glow forever to overshadow the periodic red bloodsheds on this planet...It was created to cheer at the great American genocide of the red Indians, the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Nanking, Ukraine, Nandigram, Godhra and Iraq, the two big world wars, 2008 Olympics in China and whichever going to happen to sustain the future of mankind. It will exist forever to proclaim this ‘blood’y eternal truth about man and mankind.
Courtesy: To Amit, for an (lazy) afternoon discussion on this topic.
