“There is nothing, sir, too little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”
–Samuel Johnson
- Facebook’s following is currently larger than the entire population of the world...in 1804
- Twitter is more addictive than cigarettes and liquor
- The world’s most expensive cocktail drink costs $8,830 (Rs 4,58,233)
- It costs the RBI Rs 3.17 to print a thousand rupee note but a five-rupee note costs 48 paise
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has an 80-inch tablet in his office
- Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak doesn’t have high-speed broadband at his California home
- The Tirupati temple earned Rs 200 crore by auctioning tonsured human hair against Rs 54 crore in 2011
- 29.875 years is the age at which a cricket batsman has the best average
- 63 degrees Celsius is the temperature at which an egg boils perfectly
- Men are at their happiest when they are 65
- Delhi, with a population of 1.67 crore people, has 4.25 crore mobile phones
- Census 2011 revealed that 563 million Indians had phones while only 366 million had access to toilets
- Between 2009-10 and 2011-12, spending by rural India was Rs 3,750 billion versus Rs 2,994 billion by urban india
- 42% rural households in India now own a TV set, against 26% in 1993-94
- An RTI applicant was charged Rs 1.3 lakh for photocopying documents he had sought information on
- A survey of 1,000 listed firms shows independent directors account for only 12% of boardrooms; 93% belong to forward castes, OBCs 3.8%
- At 8.8 per cent, Tamil Nadu has the highest divorce or separation rate; Delhi has the lowest, at 4.1 per cent.
- There are 25 lakh gay people in India; about 7 per cent of them are HIV-infected
- A government, howsoever corrupt, can't be called ‘Alibaba aur 40 chor’ in Parliament
- The British have invaded 90 per cent of the world’s countries
- A British woman who tests beds in inns and hotels insured her bottom for £4 million
- An Air India pilot landed a plane from Thiruvananthapuram in Kochi, 181 km away from Kozhikode where it was scheduled to arrive
- Osama bin Laden's burial at sea was confirmed by a senior US sailor with the coded message "FedEx delivered the package".
- In 1937, the princely state of Travancore had offered vice-chancellorship of Travancore University to Albert Einstein for Rs 6,000 per month
- Einstein’s brain was not particularly large
- The higher the chocolate intake of a country, the greater its chances of winning a Nobel Prize per capita—to produce just one more laureate, a nation has to up its cocoa intake by a whopping 275 million pounds a year
- The average person’s DNA has 400 flaws
- Indian students came second from last among 73 countries in a math-science contest
- Climbing stairs one at a time burns more calories than leaping up multiple steps.
- It takes more energy to sit through a 15-minute meeting than it takes Usain Bolt to run three Olympic 100m races.
- The case on the attempt on the life of Justice A.N. Ray has been dragging on for 35 years now
- 10.713 per cent of all bank account holders have the same ATM pin number: 1234
- The highest proportion of readers for romantic fiction in the country is in the Northeast: 23%; the national average is 5.6%
- Authors who finish the unfinished works of other writers are known as "continuators".
- Researchers say pushing Indian Standard Time by half an hour to accommodate the Northeast could save India 2.3 billion units of power
- A woman tells 468 lies a year on what she has eaten, about 9 times a week
- Women get more stressed than men when they read bad-news stories
- A mutation on chromosome 16 gave Elizabeth Taylor her double eyelashes
- The Anglo-Indian rice dish, Kedgeree, originally had no fish in it
- Catastrophists have valued the life of each human being at 860 euros (Rs 62,357)
- 51,000 breast implants were done in India in 2010
- The first silicone breast implant was done on a dog called Esmerelda in 1962
- The bra is 600 years old
- Women who have just finished ovulating are better at detecting snakes than at other times of their menstrual cycle
- 21 of the 30 fastest growing cities in the world are in China
- China's fertility would have declined at a similar rate without the one-child policy and would continue to decline even if the policy was discarded
- In Italian, there is a word for a summer hit song that is played everywhere you go: tormentone
- The total weight of the global human population is 287 million tonnes; 15 million tonnes of this mass is due to people being overweight, and 3.5 million tonnes due to obesity
- For the second year in a row in the United States, more new ma gazines were launched than closed
- Thinking about death is good for you
Four People We Didn’t Know Of Before 2012
| Gopal Kanda Haryana minister and Sirsa MLA and promoter of the erstwhile MDLR airlines. Featured in ex-air hostess Geetika Sharma’s suicide note alleging harassment. |
| Cheteshwar Pujara Thanks to scintillating tons against New Zealand and a double hundred against England, the young cricketer from Gujarat now seen as a replacement to Dravid. | ||
| Madhura Nagendra The mystery woman in a red tracksuit who gatecrashed the Indian contingent’s march past at the Olympics’ Opening got everyone hot under the collar for a while. |
| Aseem Trivedi The unknown cartoonist was arrested under the IT Act and accused of sedition. He goes on an 8-day fast. Later, invited to be a part of reality show, Bigg Boss. |
Four Ways To Do Psy’s Gangnam Style
Korean singer PSY becomes an overnight celebrity after the video of his song, Gangnam Style, gets over one billion views globally. A guide to do PSY’s trademark dance:
- Step One: Bend knees slightly; step a bit to the left, then right, keep a little bounce going.
- Step Two: While doing this, lift one hand as if checking the time; raise the other hand, stick out a finger and circle it like you have a chakram.
- Step Three: Next, repeat the same leg movements, but now with your hands crossed.
- Step Four: Add a running motion to the entire movement and combine all procedures.
Enjoy till you’re out of breath.
