Rajasthan and Wife Management

My family came to visit the day after I returned from Manali. It was the first time in about six years that my sister had come to India, and everyone in the family was glad to have her there. They arrived at 6 AM and we went home showered, then headed out to take my sister and grandfather to visit Akshardham. After their visit, my parents booked us a trip to Rajasthan for a week.

Our first stop was shopping - I mean Jaipur - for some shopping. After looting the city, we checked into our hotel. The next day was our tour to the Amer Palace. Situated high above Jaipur on a hill and incredibly complex in design, the palace made it very clear that the muslim Maharajas knew how to live in style. Our trip to the hilltop was facilitated by booking an elephant - a very tired one named Jamno. The elephants make 5 trips up and down the hill before they basically collapse in exhaustion. My sister and I fell in love with our elephant and felt really bad that we had made him climb up for us when we could just as well have done it ourselves. And that it cost us Rs. 500/- of which he's going to get about Rs. 20/- of food didn't make us feel any better. So we walked down. Still not the same.

The palace itself was like most other tourist sites maintained by the government - the only artwork that you can really see on the walls are key-scratches saying "Pinky loves Bittu" encircled by a poorly-shaped heart. Some of the pillars combined both muslim and hindu design styles by putting an elephant with lotus (hindu) at the top while a strictly floral design (anti-iconographic - muslim) at the bottom. My favorite part was how this Maharaja dealt with his many wives. He set up the Maharaja's Rules of Wife Management:

1) Keep secret passages so no wife knows who the king's with at night.
2) Place spies in the women's common bathing area to check for "baby bumps."
3) Prevent gossip by creating a common area for inter-wife conversation.
4) Punish all wives together by requiring them to grind wheat in the kitchen.
5) Prevent infidelity by keeping only Eunuchs as servants.

Indeed timeless lessons.

After another day of shopping and a visit to the Swaminarayan Mandir in Jaipur, we headed to the Ranthambore National Wildlife Reserve, home to the last bastion of Asiatic jungle tigers. Our first safari yielded lots of spotted deer and peacocks, but no tigers. We figured we'd seen 'em upclose and personal in Africa so not seeing them in India wasn't that big a deal. We left the next day on the return trip to Delhi. We stopped in Fatehpur Sikri (two towns - The Maharaja's palace and fort - Fatehpur - and the small poor village nearby - Sikri. Why does that not surprise me?) to see the Buland Darwaza (a large gate celebrating the Moghul emperor Akbar's conquest of Gujarat - DOH!). We continued to Mathura, to the Krishna Janmabhoomi (the birthplace of Krishna).