Buddha’s teeth
After Gautama Buddha died (around 500 years BCE) he was cremated and his ashes divided up and distributed to stupas across northern India. But some relics purportedly survived, including a surprising number of teeth.
Category: South Asia
Almost Everest
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest on May 29, 1953. But three days earlier, two other climbers came within one hundred metres of the top.
Snakes and ladders and nirvana
The classic board game snakes and ladders (or chutes and ladders) began its life as a demonstration of the Jain ascent towards nirvana and beyond.
Indian flag monopoly
Every Indian flag in India is made in one small south Indian village.
Buffalo racing
Kambala is a race with a difference: the winner may not be decided directly on speed, but rather on how high they can kick up water.
Mythical Indian Ocean continent
Before we knew about plate tectonics, a zoologist proposed a lost continent connecting Madagascar and India across the Indian Ocean. That hypothesis, now debunked, was nevertheless picked up by Theosophists and Tamil revivalists.
Dancing plant
The leaves of Codariocalyx motorius move fast enough that you can see their motion. This plant likes to dance.
Sky tubes
A Bangladeshi engineer named Fazlur Rahman Khan revolutionised the design of skyscrapers by modelling them on bamboo tubes.
Long Hindu time
One of the longest measurements of time appears in ancient Hindu scriptures: the mahā-kalpa, equal to 311.04 trillion years.
Big remade
Naani is a 2004 Telugu remake of the Tom Hanks film Big. I gotta tell you, though… it gets weird.
Feminist utopias
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw many feminist utopias that portrayed a society run by women: by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Irene Clyde, former New Zealand prime minister Julius Vogel, and the influential Bangladeshi author Begum Rokeya.
Highest unclimbed mountain
It is illegal to climb Gangkhar Puensum in Bhutan, so no-one has ever reached the top. It is the highest unclimbed mountain in the world.
The Dissent Channel
Since 1971, US diplomats and State Department workers who disagree with government policy can communicate their opposition through the Dissent Channel.
Portugal vs. Egypt in India
How about that time that the Egyptian Mamluks, with secret support from Venice, battled the Portuguese in the sea off the coast of India?
The sentinels and the missionary
In 2018 an American missionary travelled to North Sentinel Island in an attempt to bring Christianity to one of the last uncontacted peoples in the world. He did not return.
Sir doctor sheriff grandmaster dean Nariman
Temulji Bhicaji Nariman was a knight, a dean, a plague doctor, a sheriff, a grandmaster, and his marriage lasted longer than almost any other in recorded history.
The Generalist Academy 