Quotes On India

Albert Einstein: 'We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific, discovery could have been made.'

Mark Twain : 'India is the cradle of human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.'

Romain Rolland (French scholar) : 'If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.'

Hu Shih (former China ' s ambassador to India) : 'India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without sending a single soldier across her border.'

Geographical Regions in India

'India is not just a country, it is also a sub-continent.'

India has 7 major geographical zones which can be listed as below:

1) The Himalayas, and the North-eastern Mountain ranges

2) Indo-Gangetic Plains

3) The Great Thar Desert

4) Deccan Plateau and Central highlands

5) The Western Ghats (Sahyadris) Mountain range and West coast plains

6) The Eastern Ghats (hill ranges) and coastal plains

7) The continental (coral) islands and water bodies

Apart from the varied topographical landscape, India has 10 bio-geographical zones, and 3 major zoo-geographical zones with 10 sub-divisions.

Social Indicators

India has 18 major (national) languages, all explicit to each other and having their own script and style. The lingua franca being English and Hindi. Moreover, India has about 1500 different dialects spoken across its length and breadth - which means, with every 250 kms - approximately, the dialect changes, and so the culture.

India, today, has a population of around 1.1 billion people (2005 estimate)

Population Density

324 person per sq. km ( 2001 census)

Rural Population is 74.5 per cent of total population

Races in India

According to Dr B.S. Guha, an eminent anthropologist, the human population in India is derived from six main ethnic groups

1) Negrito 2) Proto-Australoids or Austrics, 3) Mongoloids, 4) Mediterranean or Dravidian
5) Western Brachycephals and 6) Nordic Aryans

India's Noble Prize Winners

•  Rabindranath Tagore, Literature, 1913

•  Sir C.V. Raman, Physics, 1930

•  Mother Teresa, Peace, 1979 (Albanian-born Indian citizen)

•  Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, Physics, 1983

•  Amartya Sen, Economics, 1998

Other Noble Prize Winners of Indian Origin

Har Gobind Khurana, Medicine, 1968 (Indian-born US citizen)