15 interesting facts about India that you didn't know before

15 interesting facts about India that you didn't know before

1. In a village called Shani Shingnapur in Maharashtra, people have been living in houses with no doors for generations. This is because they believe that whoever steals anything from this place will incur the wrath of Shani God and will have to pay for his/her sins very dearly. There is no police station in this village either.

2. India has the largest postal network in the world with over 1, 55,015 post offices. A single post office on an average serves a population of 7,175 people. The floating post office in Dal Lake, Srinagar, was inaugurated in August 2011.

3. Magnetic Hill is a gravity hill located near Leh in Ladakh, India. The hill is alleged to have magnetic properties strong enough to pull cars uphill and force passing aircraft to increase their altitude in order to escape magnetic interference.

4. Kumbh Mela gathering visible from space
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.

5. As per records released by The Guinness Book Of World Records, India is third in terms of number of records claimed every year in the world. The first two are USA and UK.

6. To avoid polluting the elements (fire, earth, water, air), followers of Zoroastrianism in India don’t bury their dead, but instead leave bodies in buildings called “Towers of Silence” for the vultures to pick clean. After the bones dry, they are swept into a central well.

7. The residents of some Indian villages rely solely on Sanskrit to communicate with each other.

8. India grows 1.2 million tons of mangoes every year, weight equivalent to 80,000 blue whales.

9. Martial Arts was first created in India.

10. The wettest inhabited place in the world
Mawsynram, a village on the Khasi Hills, Meghalaya, receives the highest recorded average rainfall in the world. Cherrapunji, also a part of Meghalaya, holds the record for the most rainfall in the calendar year of 1861.

11. Bandra Worli Sealink has steel wires equal to the earth's circumference
It took a total of 2,57,00,000 man hours for completion and also weighs as much as 50,000 African elephants. A true engineering and architectural marvel.

12. The world’s largest road network is in India—over 1.9 million miles of roads cover the country.

13. The biggest family in the world is from – you guessed it, India.

14. Around the 17th century, India was one of the richest countries in the world.

15. Shampooing is an Indian concept
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.