About India

With more than 2000 ethnic groups, her people are diverse as herself. They speak 1652 tongues, 22 of which are spoken by more than a million people each. Every major religion of the world find representation and four count her as their birth place. Her minority Muslim population is the third largest in the world and her (relatively) small Jewish community, one of the oldest.

With a history that dates back to one of the worlds earliest civilisations, and representing every significant period thereof, India is rich in art, culture and literature. She has been the object of various invasions and conquests, but always has ended up being the conqueror, accepting the best from these invaders and making them her own. Her art, culture and architecture reflect these influences that are seen in the many churches, mosques, temples, palaces and other monuments that make her cities and dot her countryside.

Within these pages, we have tried to accumulate information about this vast nation. Do drop in, look around a bit, and dig a little deeper when you find something interesting. Collect those pieces that you like and you have a travel plan that allows you to discover one of her many facets. The journey may not be an easy one, but she would have cast her spell on you, making you want to come back and look around a bit again, and dig a little deeper ...

Winter blizzards in the snow capped mountains of winter Kashmir, are a stark contrast to humid Chennai where the only three seasons are hot, hotter and hottest. Summer can mean the colour of blooms in the Himalayas, pre-monsoon showers that drop hail stones in parts of the cooler North, killer hot winds called the Loo in the north and long days of humidity and heat in the Eastern coast. The end of summer brings with it the unique Indian Monsoon. A spectacular show of nature, the monsoon accounts for 80% of India's annual precipitation, all within a short period of four months.

India is the tropical rains forests of the Andaman islands, the temperate conifers of the Himalayas, the deciduous broadleaf forests of the Central Deccan Plateau, the flooded grasslands and savannas of the kutch, the desert shrublands of the Thar and the mangroves of the Godavari and Krishna. Home to Asian Elephant, Bengal Tiger, Asiatic Lion, Leopard, Sloth Bear and Indian Rhinoceros, she accounts for 60% of the worlds biodiversity.

Attempting to describe India would be a huge task by itself, doing so in a few pages on a website would be nearly impossible. Diversity and contrasts are the only constant across a huge geography that makes her the world's seventh largest country. She is so large and her landscape so varied that she is aptly called a sub-continent rather than a country.

India is the lofty peaks of the Himalayas, she is the flat Gangetic plains where the Yamuna drops a mere 200 meters in her 1600 km journey to the Bay of Bengal, the hot dry sands of the Kutch, the wettest place on earth in Chirapungee, the sandy beaches on her 7000 km coastline, the backwaters of Kerala, the islands of Lakshadweep and the vast deccan plateau of her southern peninsula.