An evening at Jama Masjid

Yesterday was a lazy saturday afternoon with not much to do. But the evening got better. Bunch of us students got in touch with a docu film maker, Shravan Vidyarthi, who agreed to take us to the Jama Masjid to look for a story, through stills ofcourse. Getting to Jama masjid was made easy by the Delhi Metro connectivity. Not  much has changed about Delhi - 6, though. The walk from Chawri Bazaar station to the mosque was a challenge of sorts.

Once there, we realized that carrying our shoes in our bags was the only option to get into the complex, if you wanted to leave the place with your shoes on. Once in, the only word i had in my mind for the Jama Masjid was - Wow. With arches and little minarets all over the place it was just beautiful, and I could finally relate to the scale of the pictures that i had seen before on the internet or the television.

The main structure was the biggest of them all, with the two tall minarets on either side of the central structure, it almost transports one to the Mughal era. 

It was funny at first, I thought women were not allowed inside the mosque and we had two in our group. I thought we would be asked to leave the premises altogether. How wrong was I? Seems they allow women to  only visit the mosque. Prayer timings for them are separate. 

By the end of it all, we got into some trouble with the mosque authorities. Seems we were supposed to buy tickets for our cameras. So we were asked to leave or pay up, though we carried the cameras in our open hands and no one stopped us while entering.

We did leave eventually without having to cough up dough, courtesy the Masjid authorities, after which we decided to grab a bite at the famous Karim's. A stone's throw from the mosque, we verified with the owners about the authenticity of the place, considering a lot of other Karims have mushroomed all around the city. Everything was perfect, except we didn't know what to order. Which led to a not-so-great experience. But we will be back, after some research about what's good and what's not at Karim's.

We really learned a lot from Shravan, who gave us some of his valuable time. We had a great time picking his brains for advancement of our own skills. Some of you may want to visit his website to know more about Shravan and his work: http://www.shravanvidyarthi.com/