Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
The featured image and the one immediately below both show “faded glory”.
A 21st century restoration effort has rendered 17th century splendour visible again, but a deal of the original’s vibrancy is almost certainly “gone, forever”.
However, the arch in the final image is an example of the “miracles” that dedicated scholars, architects, artists and artisans can achieve, even when the restoration effort’s beginning is a century or more “too late”.
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Originally very grand, Lahore Fort’s Summer Palace has been greatly damaged and degraded – well beyond the point where an “entirely accurate”,”full” restoration would be possible, even if “limitless” funds and expertise were available
That said, however belated, the current, ongoing restoration efforts are carefully considered, meticulously executed, and have no whiff of “Disney”.
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Immediately after admiring Lahore’s picture wall we went “inside” the actual wall.
This was “illegal”, but we did so as honoured guests.
Our chaperone was a senior heritage architect, involved in the ongoing excavation and restoration of Lahore Fort’s summer palace.
Above, you are looking at one of the simpler parts of its elaborate cooling system.
The outermost of the summer palace’s many chambers are literally within the cavity of the fort’s massive outer wall.
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The above cartoon was published this week in “The Age” & “The Sydney Morning Herald”.
Artificial Intelligence offers a whole lot of possibilities, not all of which are dire.
However, it is undeniable that AI has already become the great enabler of greedy bastards who seek to profit by plagiarising (and “dumbing down”) the work/s of the world’s writers, musicians and visual artists.
Hats off to Cathy Wilcox for using her natural intelligence to depict this reality so vividly.
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The featured image shows one of the 116 such illustrated panels on Lahore Fort’s picture wall.
As the image below makes clear, the presence of so many resident doves/pigeons was definitely not an unwanted “intrusion”.
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Lahore Fort’s “picture wall” is one of “our” planet’s man-made wonders.
It may or may not be “the world’s biggest mural” – as is sometimes claimed – but it is certainly the largest Persian-style picture wall.
The artistic quality, variety and intricacy are breathtaking…most especially when one remembers that the picture wall comprises more than 6,600 square metres!
The not-quite-concluded 21st century “restoration” of this 17th century masterpiece has been hugely ambitious, but very well-considered…and not “overdone”.
This happened just in time; early this century the much-degraded picture wall came alarmingly close to its irreversible, nigh-total disintegration.
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The sign pictured above is not the kind that a tourist ever expects to see in a “summer palace”!
At the time, technically speaking, our presence was “illegal”; this location was strictly “off-limits”.
After centuries of neglect and decay, this summer palace – a deal of which had sat, “invisibly”, within a huge fort’s external wall – was undergoing a sometimes-hazardous process of meticulous restoration…and “rediscovery”.
The sign was a hazardous site’s warning to its workers.
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In the “western” world most drums are made from metal, wood and “skin” (although that “skin” is now usually synthetic) and they are usually played with sticks, mallets, or brushes.
In Asia and Africa, however, many drummers hold no stick or mallet, and their instrument is a clay pot or a vegetable gourd.
Doubtless, some “westerners” imagine that music played by a hand drummer on a clay pot is necessarily simple, crude, “unrefined”.
That assumption is dead wrong…as is strikingly illustrated by this post’s “musical bonus”.
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