In 1932 Los Angeles Olympics there were three teams, India, Japan and the USA, in men’s hockey. India won the gold by defeating Japan and USA respectively by 11–1 and 24–1. When it came to raising funds for sending the team to Los Angeles, a journalist representing the Indian Hockey Federation approached Mahatma Gandhi to …
In 1792, the weapon suppliers of Tipu Sultan designed and successfully developed the first iron-cased rockets. These were used by Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, rulers of the kingdom of Mysore, against the East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars. The British then spread this technology around the world.
The original word for chess is the Sanskrit chaturanga, meaning four members of an army, which were most likely elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers. According to a German Indologist researching on the origin of chess, in the 6th century, the Maukhari rulers of Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, used to play chaturanga with 16 cabinet terracotta before venturing into military …
Eminent physicist Albert Einstein was born in the year 1879. Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace, was born in 1869 and Adolf Hitler, the epitome of terror, in 1889. Hence the expression that Einstein was born between peace and terror. Einstein admired Mahatma Gandhi. He even expressed this admiration in a letter written in 1931 addressed to the Indian …
Cotton gets its name from the Arabic word ‘qutun’, which means fine textile or fabric. Archaeologists have found samples of cotton fabric, as old as 7000 years, at the sites of ancient civilizations, such as Mohenjo-daro, Egypt, and Mexico. Nonetheless, it is difficult to determine the exact period or place when cotton was first used for …
The term bungalow gained currency in India in the seventeenth century when the English East India Company officers started coming to India. It is derived from the Hindi word bangla, which means belonging to Bengal. Bungalows are generally one and half-storeyed houses with a front porch. The architecture of bungalows is archetypal of eastern Indian residential buildings.
