Historical musings......

A half broken down wall, with moss struggling its way through its spidery cracks. A flight of blackening stone stairs leading to a quaint chamber that seems to resonate the eerie empty silences. I’m looking at the remains of a dilapidated fort that once in all its majestic splendour housed royalty. The first thing that struck me on seeing this oddly beautiful sight was that a long time ago, in a bygone era these colossal forts lay witness to the glory of a lineage of kings and monarchs, only to be swallowed by the dark swirls of time becoming one with history.

The fascination of ‘what-may-have-been’ enthrals my imagination somewhat more than the present itself. I cannot look at these testimonies of the past without wondering about the kind of magic its old world charm held. One ‘historic’ day, as I walked through the colossal stonewalls of the Golconda fort, visions of an age gone by flashed before my eyes… I could hear the sound of life permeate through the royal palace…the images of a majestic king seated on his throne with the whole realm at his mercy, the peals of laughter coming from the harem. The tinkling of the anklets of the court dancer, the queen with her maids in her chamber, the visions of the hustle bustle of life as it passed through decades of war and peace. The Golconda fort… where the world’s largest diamond Kohinoor was discovered, where gems and precious stones were sold in heaps in marketplaces, where art and architecture saw new light of progress. It was a world of beauty, of opulence and riches, of grandeur unknown to today’s world. Today I see the magnificent Golconda fort against the backdrop of a setting sun, standing tall in pride as a testimony to Hyderabad’s glorious past.

Even a few years ago, I could be included in that class of people who think it is impractical and a total waste of time to study the past. I would declare in a pompous manner, along with the others, that enlightening oneself on dead corpses and long gone decrepit buildings will be of no use to our lives. But then after pursuing it as a subject (quite unwillingly, at first!) there seemed to be born in me, a newfound love for history. Corpses no more remained corpses, they began to fill with blood and flesh and they became breathing, walking men and women, who lived, but only in another dimension. These derelict buildings were once bustling with activity and their floors were tread upon by these same men and women. I begin to speed through from era to era in a matter of seconds…imagination running berserk, if not wild…and the rest as they say is history!