Interesting Facts

The 13th century poet saint Gyandev created the game of Snakes & Ladders. It was originally called ‘Mokshapat’. The ladders in the game represented virtues and the snakes indicated vices. The game was played with cowrie shells and dices. In time, the game underwent several modifications, but its meaning remained the same, i.e. good deeds take people to heaven and evil to a cycle of re-births. Details : Snakes and Ladders originated in India as part of a family of dice board games, including pachisi (modern day Ludo). It was known as moksha patam or vaikunthapaali or paramapada sopaanam (the ladder to salvation The game as popularly played in ancient India was known as Moksha Patam, and emphasized the role of fate or karma. A Jain version, Gyanbazi, dates to the 16th century. The game was called Leela and reflected the Hinduism consciousness surrounding everyday life. Moksha Patam was associated with traditional Hindu philosophy contrasting karma and kama, or destin...

The first chemically refined sugar appeared on the scene in India about 2,500 years ago. From there, the technique spread east towards China, and west towards Persia and the early Islamic worlds, eventually reaching the Mediterranean in the 13th century. Cyprus and Sicily became important centres for sugar production. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was considered a rare and expensive spice, rather than an everyday condiment. It is also said that In 510 BC the Emperor Darius of what was then Persia invaded India where he found "the reed which gives honey without bees". The secret of cane sugar, as with many other of man's discoveries, was kept a closely guarded secret whilst the finished product was exported for a rich profit. The first place to cultivate sugarcane explicitly for large-scale refinement and trade was the Atlantic island of Madeira, during the late 15th century. Then, it was the Portuguese who realised that new and favourable conditions for sugar p...

NASA on  23 september 2009 revealed that India's maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan-I had traced  water  molecules on the moon's surface. India's own Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on board the country's maiden unmanned lunar craft had detected evidence of water on the moon in a finding confirmed by US space agency Nasa which too had an instrument onboard Chandrayaan-I. The Nasa meanwhile thanked Isro for enabling the discovery of water on moon through Chandrayaan-I. "We want to thank Isro for making the discovery possible. The moon till now was thought to be a very dry surface with lot of rocks," NASA director Jim Green told reporters in Washington. In Bangalore, a beaming Isro chief G Madhavan Nair said the MIP while descending from Chandrayaan-I to the moon surface about a fortnight after it was launched in October picked up strong signals of water particles. Nair's remark has triggered speculation whether an Indian space mission was the first to di...

Reita Faria was one of the best known Indians worldwide in her times.  She is the the first Indian to wear the Miss World crown in 1966. She is a qualified medical practitioner and now resides in Dublin, Ireland, with her husband Dr Colin Powell, whom she married in 1971. The couple has two daughters and five grandchildren. Reita Faria Powel was born in 1945 in Mumbai. Reita grew up in Mumbai with her sister Philomena in a tight-knit Goan family that owned real estate and other businesses. Early Days of Reita Faria Born on 23rd August 1943, Reita Faria was born to Goan parents in Matunga. Although she is a Goan by birth, her childhood days were mostly spent in then Bombay. By above-mentioned ‘Miss World’ title, everyone easily assumes that she had a rich upbringing, but actually, she did not have any of these. Reita was born and brought up in a middle-class family of Mumbai where her father worked at a mineral factory, and her mother owned a salon in Marine Lines. S...

BRITAIN, A local holiday was declared for the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway on 27 September 1825. Aware of the importance of the day, crowds clustered around the newly-constructed line in anticipation. They weren’t to be disappointed. Ever the showman, George Stephenson hit speeds of 15mph in his steam locomotive, Locomotion – outpacing the local horses in the process. As one impressed spectator recalled: “The welkin [sky] rang loud with huzzas while the happy faces of some, the vacant stares of others and the alarm depicted on the countenances of not a few, gave variety to the picture”. Conceived primarily to transport coal from collieries to the river Tees at Stockton, this was the first venture in the world to employ steam engines for hauling goods. But the railway also leased out the rights to run passenger services to various operators, including two female innkeepers. Despite the fact that horses were still used far more than the unreliable locomot...

Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama becomes the first European to reach India via the Atlantic Ocean when he arrives at Calicut on the Malabar Coast. Da Gama sailed from Lisbon, Portugal, in July 1497, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and anchored at Malindi on the east coast of Africa. With the aid of an Indian merchant he met there, he then set off across the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese explorer was not greeted warmly by the Muslim merchants of Calicut, and in 1499 he had to fight his way out of the harbor on his return trip home. In 1502, he led a squadron of ships to Calicut to avenge the massacre of Portuguese explorers there and succeeded in subduing the inhabitants. In 1524, he was sent as viceroy to India, but he fell ill and died in Cochin.

Cuban Independence Movement , nationalist uprising in Cuba against Spanish rule. It began with the unsuccessful  Ten Years’ War (Guerra de los Diez Años; 1868–78) and culminated in the U.S. intervention that ended the Spanish colonial presence in the Americas. Dissatisfied with the corrupt and inefficient Spanish administration, lack of political representation, and high taxes, Cubans in the eastern provinces united under the wealthy planter  Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, whose declaration of independence in October 1868, the Grito de Yara (“Cry of Yara”), signaled the beginning of the Ten Years’ War, in which 200,000 lives were lost. Céspedes had the support of some landowners, whose main interest was economic and political independence from Spain, whereas the farmers and labourers were more concerned with the immediate abolition of slavery and greater political power for the common man. In 1876 Spain sent Gen.  Arsenio Martínez Campos to crush...