The oldest optical illusion in the world is in Tamil Nadu’s Airavatesvara Temple. The rishabha-kunjara (bull and elephant in Sanskrit) carving from Chola architecture is said to be 900 years old. In the carving, a bull and an elephant share the same head. The bull is Nandi, the sacred vehicle of Lord Shiva, while the elephant, Airavat, symbolizes the divine mount of Lord Indra, the king of heaven. The temple, located in Kumbakonam, was built by Rajaraja Chola II and is on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list of Great Living Chola Temples.

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Gol Gumbaz in Bijapur, Karnataka, is known as the Taj Mahal of South India. One of the biggest free-standing domes and one of the largest single-chamber structures in the world, Gol Gumbaz was built as a mausoleum for Sultan Mohammed Adil Shah of the Adil Shahi dynasty in the mid-17th century. The structure features a cube (measuring 47 metres on each side) topped by a dome with a diameter of 44 metres supported by interlocking arches without any columns. A “whispering gallery” rings the interior of the dome, where the faintest sound is amplified, echoing back several times. Its single chamber covers 1,700 sq metres and sits atop the basement tombs of the sultan, his two wives, his mistress, his daughter and his grandson. Each corner of the tomb is guarded by a seven-storey-tall minaret.

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University of Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. There is no clear date of foundation but teaching existed at Oxford in some form in 1096. Oxford operates the Ashmolean Museum, the world’s oldest university museum, and Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world. It hosts the Rhodes scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes. Oxford’s notable alumni include 30 U.K. prime ministers and many world heads of state and government. As of 2022, 73 Nobel Prize laureates, 4 Fields Medallists and 6 Turing Award winners have matriculated, worked or held visiting fellowships at Oxford, while its alumni have won 170 Olympic medals.

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Bhilar in Maharashtra is India’s first book village. Located between Panchgani and Mahabaleshwar, the village is formally named Pustakanche Gaav or ‘The Village of Books’. Families in the village have given parts of their homes as reading hubs, which stock nearly 35,000 books in Marathi, Hindi, English and Gujarati, for people to explore free of cost. The walls of their homes showcase designs by artists from all over India, which advertise the books you will find inside. E.g., a house decorated with Warli art depicting folk legends has books on folk tales, while Mangaltara Mansion, painted with pictures of forts and Maratha king Shivaji, stocks history books. Other genres include poetry, literature, environment, biographies, among others.

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An airplane’s ‘black box’ is actually fluorescent flame-orange in colour. It is painted bright orange in colour to make it more visually conspicuous in the debris after an accident. It is lettered “Flight Recorder Do Not Open” on one side in English and in French on the other side. To assist recovery from submerged sites it must be equipped with an underwater locator beacon which is automatically activated in the event of an accident.

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Kashmiri saffron has a Geographical Indication tag (GI), marking its ingenuity and making it illegal for anyone outside the valley to sell a similar product under the “Kashmiri saffron” name. Jammu & Kashmir is the only state in India that produces saffron, also known as ‘red gold’. Pampore is known as the ‘saffron bowl’; the town’s saffron is considered to be of superior quality because of the high concentration of crocin (8.72%) — which gives the saffron its darker colour and medicinal value — as compared to the Iranian variety (6.82%).

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The Ocean Sunfish or Mola is the largest and heaviest bony fish in the world, reaching 14 feet vertically and 10 feet horizontally and weighing nearly 1,000 kgs. They have a dorsal fin that often gets mistaken for a shark fin when they swim near the top of warm, tropical oceans.

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Mobile Phone Throwing is an official sport in Finland. Since 2000, the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships is organized every year in Savonlinna in August. Participants throw mobile phones and are judged on distance or technique. The phones used weigh between 220-400 grams. The current male and female world record holders are Dries Feremans (362.3 feet) and Ivonee Weiner (221.7 feet) respectively.

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With 37 teeth in his mouth, Vijay Kumar V.A. from Bangalore holds the Guinness World Record for ‘The man with the most teeth’. He has five more than the average person and more than anyone else in the world. Vijay explains that there are some disadvantages to having so many teeth, one being that he often bites his tongue!

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Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, is home to one of the natural world’s mysteries: rocks that sail across this lakebed, propelled by nothing that anyone can see. Stones of dolomite and syenite, ranging from a few hundred grams to hundreds of kilogrammes, create visible trails as they slide across the playa surface, without human or animal intervention. The trails show that these rocks have rolled and zig-zagged across the ground, sometimes for as long as 860 feet. The stones’ mysterious movement is probably caused by a combination of rain, wind, ice and sun all working together.

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