Yesterday was one of the most rewarding days of my life. Initially, I had constructed the sentence as “one of the most rewarding days of my trivia life.” But that didn’t say much, whereas I wanted to say it all...
As a five-year-old, all that I wanted to do upon growing up was become a teacher. There was nothing particularly remarkable about that dream because almost every other five-year-old around me wanted the same thing. That dream lasted only a few years, and eventually got buried under other ambitions and plans for life. Eventually, perceptions – whether mine or of those around– convinced me that teaching was not for me. It demanded too much patience, and that was an area where I certainly lacked. Over time, I also grew interested in fitting into offices, surrounded by the paraphernalia and peculiarities of “regular, nine-to-five” jobs, and that’s what I have been doing now continuously for years.
Well, i happened to visit the Pondy University yesterday and i had a chance to get inside the History Dept. where i landed across a huge archive of historical records. Moreover, it was wonderful to get back to know history, and be in a knowledge environ again. It was like something I could get interested in and here I was.
I landed across the history of the Mughal Empire.
Now I have always maintained that no one loves the Mughals more than I do.I met a group of students.These were serious students as they knew how social sciences worked, how movements progressed, and most importantly, this was the first time in the record of this campus that a course on Mughal history was being offered. They told me that this was their first time coming across something like this, and that they hoped to do a fair job because otherwise they could potentially end up messing up their perception and understanding of a country with over a billion people. They laughed, and with that we began the whole process of understanding the Indian subcontinent and the Mughals: how Babur—the military genius—loved fruits and hated Agra, why Humayun loved opium and pursued astrology, how Akbar was both a compassionate genius as well as a sexual predator, how Jahangir was creative enough to design his own clothes yet ruthless enough to blind his own son, how Shahjahan was almost effeminate because of his love for white marble, and how Aurangzeb can be and is so easily and greatly misunderstood.
These were some new facts that i came across about the Mughal nobles. I wanted to delve more into this but as time and my job constrained me to do so, i had no other option than to go. I bid my new friends farewell and promised to share more information with them as & when i could and told them also to return the same gesture.
I'll come back with more trivia about these great grand people and more of other trivia.
