Culture

In the early 90s, the Indian government released specially-raised flesh-eating turtles into the Ganga to eat and clear the river of partly-burned corpses from the Varanasi ghats. The programme failed as poachers captured and wiped out the turtle population (again).

Gondwanaland, the Pangaean supercontinent that existed millions of years ago is named after Gondwana, a region in Central India. Gondwana comes from the Sanskrit goṇḍavana or the forest of the Gonds, a tribe spread across the area.

पोटा (pōṭā) in Sanskrit is a word that represents a masculine woman, or a bearded woman or one with other such masculine features. Alternatively, it can also mean hermaphrodite or simply, a female servant.

The Loo is a hot, debilitating wind that sweeps across Western India, particularly Rajasthan in the months of May and June. Heatstrokes are referred to as Loo lagna (लू लगना). Apparently, Hamdard's Rooh-afza is based on a unani recipe for a drink with cooling properties recommended during this time.

The word saffron, a colour often associated with Hinduism, is believed to have its root in the Arabic word, az-za'faran which is itself of unknown origin.

The name crocus, for the flowering plant and source of saffron, is very likely ultimately descended from Sanskrit kunkumam (कुङ्कुमं) by way of 'Semitic', Arabic, and Greek.

Fela Kuti, often called Africa's Bob Marley, had a spiritual advisor named Professor Hindu who had the power to "kill and wake"—to kill a man and bring him back to life. Kuti turned down a million dollar deal with an American record label on Hindu advice.

When the first edition of the American poet, Walt Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented that it read like “a mixture of the Bhagavat Ghita [sic] and the New York Herald”.

In Vedic times, if you killed a man, you had to offer 100 cows as restitution.