rahulvverma@gmail.com | Delhi, May, 2024: This video starts on a warm summer morning in Delhi. We wake up and get walking before the summer sun heats things up too much. We kick things off right at the front entrance of the magical ruins of Tughlaqabad Fort in Delhi. This fort was built 700 years ago when the Tughlaq rule over Delhi began and their ruler Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq decided to build a massive walled fortress city in Delhi in order to protect his rule from any Mongol invaders who were a consistent threat for large parts of Asia at that time.
Our walk this morning proceeds through the giant thick walls of the Tughlaqabad Fort and just as we enter we notice a surprising, stark silence on the other side of these walls - while the outside of the fort is noisy and loud, the inside is calm and quiet. We witness the first panoramic view of the ruins of Tughlaqbad that any visitor would have witnessed 700 years ago after entering this fortified city.
From here we walk deeper into the fort with a mysterious silence accompanying us, only interrupted by the chirping of the birds. It was as though the birds had noticed our arrival and were singing to let their peers know. Inside the fort we take our time to explore various crumbling buildings, also trying understand what could have been their original use when the area was built by the Tughlaqs as their brand new walled city.
Just as the strange silence of this place and the chirping of the birds give us company, we also notice a almost consitent hum of the airplanes flying above us every few mins - looks like the historical ruins of Tughlaqabad lay right under a frequently used commercial air traffic corridor today. We spend our morning enjoying all these sounds and witnessing the strange structures of this fort. We notice the places where the Tughlaq royals must have stayed and met, and we also witnessed what seemed like the more residential part of the fort.
While there is a lot to explore of this magnificent place, we feel the sun beating down hard on us after spending more 2 hours at the Tughlaqabad fort. So, we decide to call it a day and to come back to this fort another day when we would explore other mysteries and sights and sounds of this magical place.