Monuments of Love

There were very few monuments built for love, to show love, like the Taj Mahal, the one known across the globe.

The idea was simple. Shah Jahan wanted to create something in the memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz, someone he loved deeply. For that, he imagined something that had not been conceived before, something that would stay through the years, like the pyramids. So he built a makbara in her memory, where she would be buried, and where he would be buried too when his time came. A simple idea, to be with her even after death.

It was love made loud. Something deeply personal, once meant to be felt, was turned into something meant to be seen. A quiet emotion became an announcement across history. And honestly, we don’t know how much of the story is love and how much is legend. We don’t know whether it was built purely for Mumtaz, or also for the world, for people who would come centuries later and remember Shah Jahan not for his wars or his mistakes, but for this one grand act of devotion.

It came at an enormous cost. Of wealth, of time, of an empire stretched thin. There are stories, unproven but repeated, about workers being punished so that nothing like it could ever be built again. What is certain is this, the monument that stood for love also stood for excess. In the end, Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his own son, Aurangzeb, and died looking at the Taj Mahal from afar, before finally resting beside Mumtaz, just as he had imagined.

And yet, something has changed since then.

Today, monuments are no longer witnesses of love, they are victims of it. Forts, walls, old public buildings, everywhere you look, there are names carved into stone. Ankur ♡ Suhani. Adam ♡ Lily. Ali ♡ Fatima. Varun ♡ Aaisha. Love scratched hurriedly, as if carving it makes it real, as if writing it down makes it last.

What once took decades, intention, and sacrifice to express is now reduced to a moment of impulse. Something meant to outlive generations is used to validate emotions that might not survive time. And we call it love, while slowly destroying the very beauty we claim to admire.

Maybe this reflects a deeper shift.

Love, once private and internal, has become something to display. From monuments to Instagram stories. From devotion to declarations. Decisions made less for the self and more for the gaze of others. We announce relationships before understanding them. We perform love before living it. And sometimes, we confuse attention with connection.

At the same time, love itself feels almost absent in some lives. People chasing careers, stability, survival. Not because they don’t believe in love, but because they know what they want, or at least what they don’t. And strangely, that honesty feels more respectable than pretending, than carving names into stone or timelines just to fit into a story written by society.

Maybe love was never meant to be proven. Maybe the strongest kind was always the quiet one, the one that didn’t need witnesses, the one that didn’t need to last forever in stone to be real.

Something that was built for love, with the intention of permanence, now stands surrounded by temporary emotions trying to borrow its eternity.

And maybe that says less about love itself and more about how desperately we are trying to be seen, to be accepted from the lens of others, friends, families, societies, religions...

With the hope that Sanjay and Anjali, and many more, are still in love as they have written on this stone... And if they are not, I hope they come back and check it out for the clarity of the reader...

With the hopes of writing names, not on the forts or internet, but in my beloved diary.

-Vimarsh Shah

December 2025, Jaipur