Fun facts from the 3-part Amazon Prime travel show James May: Our Man In India:
Dharavi is an area of just over one-square-mile and the population density is reckoned to be around 800,000 people per-square-mile, or over 50 times as dense as London.
..."slum" is a bit negative, because this area is also well-known for having a low crime rate, for having excellent education and for being fantastically productive, because there are about 15,000 small, unlicensed cottage industries in here and the whole thing has an annual economy of over a billion dollars.
Dharavi dates from the 19th century and is an unplanned rabbit warren of alleys and streets...Dharavi is where Slumdog Millionaire was filmed.
Udaipur is India's city of romance. It's what Venice is to Italy, or Sheffield is to England.
Holika was an evil demoness who had a nephew, Prahlada, who was unreasonably obsessed with Lord Vishnu and this annoyed his dad, so he sent his sister, i.e., Holika, to, sort of, do him in. And the way she planned to do this was to lure him towards a giant bonfire where he would be consumed by the flames. Now, for her protection, she had a magical shawl, but at the last minute, Lord Vishnu summoned up a gust, which plucked it from her shoulders and put it onto Prahlada so he was saved and she was burnt to a crisp. And if that sounds quite harsh, she was an evil sorceress, so she was asking for it.
On the day of Holika Dahan, there are bonfires all over the town. They're lit in sequence.
Like religious festivals the world over, this festival of Holi celebrates many common themes, obvious ones such as light, changing of the seasons, the passage of the moon, the triumph of good over evil, and also, of course, if we can just return to Hinduism very briefly, it's also about the love between Krishna and Radha.
The Panna Meena stepwell was built in the 1500s to collect monsoon rain.
Founded in 1931, Sanspareils Greenlands, SG to his mates, is India's largest cricket gear company. Their Meerut factory alone knocks up 350,000 bats a year. The willow for the bats comes rom England.
SG makes around 200,000 balls a year to the same precise recipe. Each ball weighs between 156 to 161 grams.
Maharajas' Express is the world's most expensive train. "...they've built what is actually a little bit of a Raj fantasy". Prepare yourselves for death by luxury.
While the Maharajahs' Express was built in 2010, its 14 opulent guest carriages are designed to evoke a bygone golden era.
Completed in 1648, the Taj Mahal took 20,000 people 20 years to construct.
They play cricket on the Varanasi ghats? Yes, they do, that's the national religion
The railway (in Darjeeling) was built by the British to get tea down from the mountains. A descent of 7,000 feet. The railway originally didn't have any locomotives. It was pulled by horses, and I think elephants in the monsoon.
In Darjeeling, traffic doesn't wait for the train, the train waits for traffic.
Buddhists make up around a quarter of Darjeeling's population.
The purpose of Buddhist prayers on the flags is to be caught by the wind when they flutter and get carried away to spread goodwill and peace amongst humankind.
The future of nations is humanity. - H. G. Wells
The future of nations is rock and roll. - James May
Tea came to India by very suspicious means because there was an English botanist who snuck into China disguised as a Mandarin, and stole tea bushes and brought them out to India.
The Silver Needle variety of tea from Darjeeling's Glenburn Estate retails for about £2,000 a kilo in the UK.
It's often said that the British colonised the world for spices, and then never used them.
Carrom is an Indian game, about 200 years old. It can be thought of as a cross between pool, billiards, and air hockey.
The Sundarbans is an archipelago of 102 islands.
Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest on Earth, home to poisonous snakes, man-eating sharks, and giant saltwater crocodiles and that's not even the worst of it. There are reckoned to be about 100, 105 tigers in Sundarbans.
You can identify a tiger by its flanks. No two tigers have same type of flanks. It's like barcode... on the tiger.
Sundarban honey is reckoned to be some of the best in the world. It is very, very rich and most flavoursome, and inevitably, it has medicinal properties. But the bad news is, the hives are in tiger country.
The local bees are quite big and aggressive. Apis Dorsata are giants of the bee kingdom, over an inch long, and with a stinger so sharp it can pierce a tiger's skin. The remarkable statistic is that it takes one bee, 80 flowers worth of mining, to make one drop of honey.
India is the most populous country in the world
India's 23rd official language is...the horn.
His advice to tourists - Please don't come here and fret about India's problems... because the truth is, they're exactly the same problems as we have at home... they're just magnified hereby the sheer size of the place and the number of the people.