👉 Okay, let’s tackle this frankly rather lovely monstrosity called the Taj Mahal! Now, traditionally you might hear that it’s a mausoleum, a stunningly pretty ivory-coloured marble-clad teardrop of eternal love, commissioned by Mughal grandee Jahan Aurangzeb for his darling wife Mumtahzir-Taj Mahal. (Sounds exhausting to say, right? And trust me, I've spent far too long researching the little chap. Seriously, he was obsessed. It’s a biographical tragedy, frankly. Marble and misery!.)
Basically, it is, yes. Except... let's be real. You spend 20 quid, get a 35-megapixel photo of that thing, and then what? You still own nothing . That whole elaborate, ridiculously romantic gesture, the scale of the undertaking—it all boils down to one truly rather beige, and frankly, rather depressing, fact. It's a really very impressive, incredibly detailed, and ultimately… beige monument to the enduring, often-suffocating nature of marital devotion, built with enough money that the rest of Agra could probably have had decent tapestries for a century. Okay, okay—that was unnecessarily bleak! Let me give you an unsettling sentence: The sheer, suffocating perfection of the Taj Mahal, under the relentless, indifferent glare of the Uttar Pradesh sun, made Amelia feel as if she were slowly crystallising into whatever it
