Taj, Wonders

My obligatory "you've got to do it while you're in India" visit to the Taj Mahal on Saturday coincided with this weird sham contest put together by a Swiss NGO to name the "New Seven Wonders of the World." The gist of it was that people all around the world would send text messages from their cell phones and through this American Idol-style process (which allowed for multiple votes, as well as for people to "buy" votes) seven monuments from around the world would be honored in a ceremony in Portugal on Saturday. Works out pretty nicely for the phone companies and the organizers, right? If anyone has ideas for a similar moneymaking scheme, I'm in.

Here in India, however, the poll was taken pretty seriously, with the networks all devoting wall-to-wall coverage of the countdown to the announcement. My friend Amu, who is a correspondent at NDTV, spent the entire day shooting spots and doing interviews, starting early in the morning and ending after 4am Sunday when it was finally announced that, yes, in fact, the Taj is wonder-ful.

Throughout the day, the news stations kept rhetorically asking regular people and "experts" about the importance of such a ridiculous and arbitrary poll in determining whether the Taj is a "wonder" — but in devoting so much airtime to the event, they were, of course, the whole reason why the poll was "important" in the first place. One channel, Times Now, even thought it worthwhile to interview me:


How not to take a picture of yourself in front of a monument: