It may come to that - but if so, why not prepare a global auction now before any further damage is done? Who knows, an eccentric Texan billionaire might transport it to Dallas, or the Sultan of Brunei might pay for it to be specially flown to a chosen site on his island. Your Hindu fundamentalist friends, the fools of the Bharatiya Janata Party are, in any case, in favour of knocking down the Taj since they believe it was built on the site of a destroyed Hindu temple. The measures may make the filth belched out of surrounding factories a little less poisonous, but the Taj will still not survive.A great deal more is needed to ensure that the Taj Mahal is saved: 6000 square miles around the Taj need to be cleared of industry and traffic; the vile Mathura oil refinery needs to be relocated - preferably to the moon.The Agra Chamber of Commerce has said that it would rather see the Taj taken away stone by stone than see the Mathura refinery go. There are signs of radical surgery with new marble sitting crudely against the old, but the cancer continues to spread.I know your government is aware of this since it has recently allocated funds to preserve the world's most beautiful monument It isn't enough. The very same Taj Mahal is now dying, as is revealed in "Save The Taj Mahal - An Open Letter To India", Without Walls, at 9pm, tomorrow on Channel 4. The once luminous building is becoming opaque and dull. The marble is pockmarked and stained, the gleaming white turning yellow, brown and black.

It's not enough just to try to preserve the Taj Mahal, the producer of the 'Bandung File' tells India's Prime Minister - you also have to take care of the environment For Rudyard Kipling and countless others, the Taj Mahal was the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy and all things unhappy A lover's sigh in marble. A man has defied both English and German court orders ..." Catherine Laylle's voice cracks. "Please, please help," the letter ends.So far, she has not had a reply.. They are fluent in three languages and have always had a totally cosmopolitan upbringing. Yet a High Court in Lower Saxony decided not to return the abducted boys to their British mother on the strength of four words uttered by a nine-year-old: 'Ich bin doch Deutscher'."I have deep respect for the German legal system, but all of us involved in this strongly feel that a miscarriage of justice has been committed. She holds up a letter she has written to Chancellor Kohl seeking his support. She quotes: "My children, as myself, typify the new Europe you are so actively promoting.

The latter is succinct: "I think it is a clear breach of international agreement, and our Lord Chancellor should make direct representation to his German equivalent. It puts a cart and horses through any idea of European agreement. But I think it is probably fairly symptomatic of German feeling."Catherine Laylle is having trouble understanding this. She is not confident their father will ever allow them to say that. Peter Volkmann will not comment upon the case."I am not going to give up," she says. "If I, a fighter, cannot get my children back, what hope is there for there for anyone else? I just want a judge to read the view of an independent psychologist.