Kinship of Rivers Project: How the British took Delhi and how we got to Kolkata

This here is the Red Fort, which was the residence of the Mughal Emperors until the British overtook it in 1803.

Red Fort.

It had a REAL LIVE moat!

Natural paths created by repetitive passages along the same route are called Desire Paths

Chris got an audioguide. The audioguide office was filled with inspirational posters, helping to keep moral high among the auidoguide officers. The audioguide itself was narrated by the direct heir to the Red Fort, 47 generations later. When he dies, his son will take his place, and narrate a new audioguide for the Red Fort. All factoids in this blog post are either from the audioguide, or looked up on Wikipedia at the time of posting.

When you walk into one of these tourist spots, you get a thorough, vigorous pat-down from these tall, broad-shouldered, mustachioed soldiers. Who doesn't like a good pat-down, right Chris?

Here's a building

This poor dog. Stray dogs are everywhere in India. You can't help but feel bad for the poor guys.

Out this door was where guests parked their elephants. Remember to tip the elephant valet 50 Rs and he won't walk off with a tusk.

If you were wondering, this is actually how the British took Delhi, with lots of guns. That's also how they held on to it after repeated uprisings.

The Indians put up a fight with these wicked looking swords, but it was pretty brutal. Chris's audioguide kept on rattling off these horrible stories about the British killing every single one of the likely heirs of the Mughal throne, looting the Red Fort, taking it's priceless gems, destroying the harems, etc.

Brass knuckles of Indian origin.

Chain mail booties.

Sometimes the Prime Minister comes down to the Red Fort and has a nice little sit in the throne.

This grass was excellent

India's full of these Peepal Trees, under which Buddha found enlightenment

Lots of birds everywhere

This little guy

This is where the a 17th Mughal emperor and his friends composed poetry. It is here where Persian poet Amir Khusrow penned the lines

"If heaven can be on the face of the earth,

It is this, it is this, it is this"

Easy to say if you and your buddies have the equivalent of gazillions of dollars of the empire's wealth for your own private enjoyment.

This was filled with water.

The military guards live in the fort now. Note the camo pants hanging up to dry.

Hanuman, what a guy.

Here's everyone on the train. We sat next to a nice Bengali couple. Both Chris and Ping got an awful case of Delhi Belly on the train. In the middle of the night, Chris's bag with his passport, camera, credit cards, and money fell off his bed, and someone kicked it somewhere down the aisle. Someone found it the next day, much to everyone's relief.

Out the window here you can see one of the local trains. Thank god we weren't on one of those -- I don't know what we would have done with everyone so sick.

Poor guy

Amul controls most of the dairy industry in India, which is huge. The label on Amul packages is often changed by its package designers to reflect current sentiments about politics, the main message being "don't try to butter us up".

Felt real bad for Chris here. The taxi folks let us skip to the front of the tremendous line once we got to Kolkata because he was so sick.

Not that we were going anywhere fast. We quickly found Kolkata traffic to be going about the same speed as it was in Delhi: About zero mph.

Some safe construction practices here in Kolkata.

They've got real live rickshaws here in Kokata if you're up for feeling the true colonial spirit

Some neat grafiti here in Kolkata.

We stayed in the part of town that's mostly very old colonial buildings.

Straight edge graffiti here in Kolkata

Vote Nandini Mukherje!

This here's a fortune I got from the fortune telling bird. The parrot comes out, picks a card for you, then goes back in the cage. Happened so fast, it was hard to tell if the bird really did anything at all. All I got was this pretty cryptic fortune.