"The year 2005 was declared as the buildings 350th anniversary, and in September of that year, a crowd of people collectively offered at the building a shawl measuring 100 m in length....as a standard gesture of congratulations meted out to persons but offering a shawl at a tomb is a religious rite in Islam. To avoid any misunderstanding the members of this crowd were at pains to point out that they represented many different religions and theirs was a ‘secular shawl’. Reverence for the Taj was thereby removed from any specifically ‘Islamic’ context and a common ownership was declared."