15 Facts About India You Should Know
- An Indian lady, Shakuntala Devi, “the human computer” in 1971, defeated a computer in the U.S. by calculating the cube root of 18,81,38,517 faster.
- The 2011 Kumbh Mela was the largest gathering of people with over 75 million pilgrims. The gathering was so huge that the crowd was visible from space.
- Shampoo was invented in India, not the commercial liquid ones but the method by use of herbs. The word 'shampoo' itself has been derived from the Sanskrit word champu, which means to massage.
- The first rocket was so light and small that it was transported on a bicycle to the Thumba Launching Station in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.
- India is second only to the USA when it comes to speaking English with around 125 million people speaking the language, which is only 10% of our population.
- India was the first country to develop extraction and purifying techniques of sugar. Many visitors from abroad learnt the refining and cultivation of sugar from us.
- Initially, diamonds were only found in the alluvial deposits in Guntur and Krishna District of the Krishna River Delta. Until diamonds were found in Brazil during the 18th century, India led the world in diamond production.
- The Sikh shrine Golden Temple in India feeds a vegetarian meal free of cost to over 100,000 people a day regardless of race, religion and class.
- Varanasi is the oldest, continuously inhabited city in the world today.
- India has the world’s largest school in terms of students, the City Montessori School in Lucknow. It has more than 45 thousand students.
- Chess , Buttons , ruler, cataract surgery, plastic surgery, all are inventions of India.
- 'Place Value System' and the 'Decimal System' were developed in India in 100 B.C.
- The game of Snakes & Ladders was created by the 13th century poet saint Gyandev. The game was played with cowrie shells and dices. The moral of the game being - good deeds take people to heaven and evil to a cycle of re-births.
- The value of "pi" was first calculated by the Indian Mathematician Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century, long before the European mathematicians.
- Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus also originated in India. Quadratic Equations were used by Sridharacharya in the 11th century.
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