Keibul Lamjao on Manipur’s Loktak Lake sits on phumdis, floating mats of soil and vegetation. It is the last natural home of the sangai, the brow-antlered deer.
Wacky Facts
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Shani Shingnapur village has houses without doors.
Residents believe the deity Shani protects them, so traditionally homes had no doors.
A Rajasthan stepwell has about 3,500 steps arranged in perfect symmetry.
Chand Baori in Abhaneri, built around the 9th century, descends 13 storeys into the ground; the air at the bottom stays several degrees cooler than at the surface.
800A lake in Uttarakhand is full of human skeletons up to 1,200 years old.
Roopkund, at about 5,000 m, holds the remains of several hundred people. A 2019 DNA study found at least three distinct groups who died there centuries apart, including people with Mediterranean ancestry.
Kolkata’s Great Banyan is a forest that has no main trunk.
The tree in the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose botanical garden covers over 1.8 hectares through thousands of aerial roots. Its original trunk was removed in 1925 after fungal decay, yet the tree lives on.
2020A meteorite crater lake in Maharashtra turned pink overnight in 2020.
Lonar Lake was formed by a meteorite impact roughly 50,000 years ago. In June 2020 its water turned pink, which researchers linked to salt-loving microbes (haloarchaea) flourishing as the water level dropped.
Kumbh Mela crowds are visible from space.
The Kumbh Mela is one of the largest human gatherings on Earth, with tens of millions of pilgrims, and satellite images have captured its scale.
2017The oldest known written zero is in an Indian birch-bark manuscript.
Carbon dating published by the Bodleian Library in 2017 placed parts of the Bakhshali manuscript, which uses a dot for zero, centuries earlier than previously thought.
The Golden Temple’s kitchen feeds up to 1 lakh people a day.
The langar serves free meals to everyone, regardless of background.
Meghalaya has living root bridges.
Khasi and Jaintia communities guide rubber-tree roots across streams; some bridges are centuries old.
India’s national anthem takes 52 seconds.
The full version of Jana Gana Mana is sung in about 52 seconds; a short version takes about 20.
Snakes and Ladders was created in India.
The game originated in ancient India as “Moksha Patam”, teaching that good deeds lead up and bad deeds lead down.
One of the world’s highest post offices is in a Himalayan village of about 150 people.
The post office at Hikkim in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, sits at about 4,400 m and is reached in summer by tourists who come just to post a letter.
India’s railway network carries over 20 million passengers a day.
Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest rail networks and one of the largest employers in the world.
UPI processes billions of payments every month.
Launched in 2016, UPI became India’s most popular digital payment system, handling well over ten billion transactions a month by 2024.
India has the world’s largest postal network.
India Post has around 1.5 lakh post offices, most in rural areas.
1861Cherrapunji once got over 26 metres of rain in a year.
Between August 1860 and July 1861 it received about 26,461 mm of rain, a record for a single year.
Kumbhalgarh Fort has one of the longest continuous walls in the world.
The fort’s wall in Rajasthan runs for about 36 km and is wide enough in places for several horses side by side.
Buttons and fine measuring scales were used in the Indus Valley.
Buttons made of shell have been found at Mohenjo-daro; an ivory scale from Lothal has fine graduations for measurement.
Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest employers.
It employs more than a million people and carries millions of passengers every day.
Kerala was the first state to be declared fully literate.
Kerala has consistently had India’s highest literacy rate.
India has a floating post office.
A post office on a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar serves tourists and locals.
Loktak Lake has floating islands.
Its phumdis — floating masses of vegetation — host Keibul Lamjao, the world’s only floating national park.
Chandigarh was designed by a Swiss-French architect.
Le Corbusier planned the city in the 1950s as one of India’s first planned cities after independence.
Yoga became an international day because of a UN vote.
The UN General Assembly declared 21 June the International Day of Yoga in 2014, after a proposal by India.
Ladakh’s “magnetic hill” is an optical illusion.
Cars appear to roll uphill near Leh, but the slope actually runs downhill; the surrounding landscape hides the true horizon. Such places are called gravity hills.
Shampoo, jungle and pyjamas are English words borrowed from Indian languages.
Hundreds of English words come from Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and other Indian languages — including bungalow, shampoo, jungle, pyjamas and cot.