Here is the third and final installment of 35 More Interesting Facts About India. This is in follow-up to my part I andpart II of mind-blowing and interesting facts about India. Enjoy.
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1. In 2011, Guinness officially acknowledged Asha Bhosle as the most recorded artist in music history for recording up to 11,000 solo, duet and chorus-backed songs in over 20 Indian languages since 1947.
2. In the Battle of Longewala during Indo-Pak War of 1971, 120 Soldier of Indian Army defeated 2800 Soldiers of Pakistan.
3. The first official set of rules for snooker or billiards were drafted in 1882 Ooty, Tamil Nadu.
4. A Chinese pop star named Sa Dingding sings in Sanskrit (ancient language of India).
5. In parts of India, especially Bihar, grooms are often kidnapped by bride’s family due to escalating demand for dowries and are forcefully married off.
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6. According to a study conducted in 2011, India’s Parle-G biscuits were the world’s No. 1selling biscuits.
7. Cherrapunji is the wettest place on earth, but its residents have very serious problem of water shortages because Cherrapunji is built on a foundation of porous limestone and all the water that falls from the sky every day falls right through the ground like a sieve.
8. In India, the phrase “Horn OK Please” that appears on the back of most commercial vehicles has been attributed to multiple possible origins. On theory is that during WW2 trucks were also run on kerosene due to shortage of petrol. Kerosene was so unstable that even a slightest accident could cause the trucks to blow up. Therefore commercial vehicles started painting on its back saying “Horn Please, On Kerosene.”
9. India does not have a National Language, Hindi and English are two Official Languages.
10. Sanjiv Mehta, a Mumbai-born entrepreneur, above all an “Indian” now owns The East India Company.
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11. An asteroid almost caused a nuclear war between India and Pakistan in 2002. Fortunately it exploded over Mediterranean Sea. If it would have occurred at the same latitude a few hours earlier, the explosion might have resembled a nuclear detonation equivalent to the blast that destroyed Hiroshima.
12. One of the testing shafts of the 1998 nuclear tests by India was code named “White House.”
13. Of the countries with nuclear weapons, only China, India, and North Korea have a declared “no first use” policy.
14. Helium was discovered in India by French astronomer Jules Janssen in 1868.
15. There is an Asian brown cloud, a 2-mile-thick blanket of polluted air that covers much ofSouth Asia that forms each year between January and March might be responsible for the premature deaths of a half-million people each year in India alone
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16. The Dabbawalas of Mumbai, who deliver over 2,00,000 meals from individual homes to offices every day with mostly illiterate delivery staff uses no computers and has only three levels of management. Yet, they are one of the most reliable supply chains in the world equivalent to a six sigma standard.
17. Chilli is not native to India and was only introduced in 1500’s. Prior to that pepper was widely used in India.
18. Some ritual chants of Kerala have patterns, but no known meaning. They can’t be written down and can only be transmitted orally. No language has phonetic equivalents for it. Their nearest analog is bird songs! These aural traditions are actually bird vocalizations which originated before human speech.
19. There is a very rare blood type beyond the usual ABO groups, called “Oh” found only in 0.0004% of the general population, but 0.01% of the population in Mumbai.
20. Delhi’s Red Fort was originally white and also Delhi’s celebrated Jantar Mantar building too was once white.
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21. In 1943, British PM Winston Churchill let millions of Indians starve to death in a man-made famine by refusing to release food rations, instead exporting food out of India.
22. The 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake was so powerful that in addition to causing 230,000 deaths, it caused the entire earth to “wobble” on its axis by between 1 and 6 cm, thus increasing the length of a day on earth by 2.68 microseconds.
23. Arabic numerals were not invented by Arabs, but by Indian mathematicians.
24. Udham Singh was an Indian Revolutionary who traveled to London to assassinate a British General, Michael O’Dwyer for massacring innocent Indians in Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre. He was hanged on July 31st, 1940.
25. There is a strong but inconclusive theory that the Western Ghats of India contributed to extinction of dinosaurs.
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26. Indians were not allowed to board the Palace on Wheels luxury train for quite a while since its launch on Republic day 1982 and its passengers were restricted to foreign nationals
27. There was a girl born named Lakshmi Tatma in India with four arms and legs due to an underdeveloped conjoined twin.
28. ‘Nihali’ (spoken in in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra) is an isolated language unrelated to any known language in the world and it’s spoken by only 2000 (in 1991) people.
29. An India-based Neutrino Observatory is being is expected to be completed in 2015 in Theni District of Tamil Nadu. It is going to be one of the biggest experimental particle physics projects undertaken in India that will house the world’s most massive magnet, four timeslarger than the 12,500-tonne magnet used in the CERN in Switzerland.
30. In 326 BCE Alexander the Great met a fourteen-year-old named Chandragupta Maurya. By age twenty, Chandragupta had succeeded in forging his own empire across northern India, and would eventually unify nearly the entire subcontinent.
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31. Elephants kept Alexander the Great from expanding further east into present day India, because he saw that the kings of the Nanda Empire and Gangaridai could deploy between 3,000 and 6,000 war elephants if need be.
32. The first ever fingerprint bureau in the world was started in Calcutta in the year 1897.
33. The highest post office in the world is in Spiti Valley in the state of Himachal Pradesh at about 14200 feet.
34. The largest oil refinery in the world is the Jamnagar Refinery owned by Reliance Industries in Gujarat, with a daily capacity of 668,000 barrels.
35. The world’s highest cricket ground was built in India in 1893. It is in Chail, Himachal Pradesh and is 2444 metres above sea level. It was built by flattening a hilltop.
