CHARLOTTE TOTTENHAM

One hundred and seventy kilometres south west of Patna in Bihar, in a small village named Atraulia, a very modern sect of Hinduism is emerging. This community devotes their worship to one-time cricket champion Sachin Tendulkar. Now retired, Tendulkar has been dubbed one of the greatest batsmen of all time and is the only player to have achieved more than 30,000 runs in international cricket. This year he was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s most prestigious civilian award.

Lal Bihari is a unremarkable farmer from Uttar Pradesh. In 1975, this local man went to the bank to take out a loan. On presenting the requisite paperwork, Bihari was told that he was in fact, techincally and legally, dead. After much investigation and effort, it transpired that a conniving uncle had bribed a local police official to declare him dead so that he could pilfer Bihari’s one acre of land. Not so unremarkable after all. Bihari spent the following nineteen years

I learnt a phenomenal statistic this morning - over 2.5 million tourists visit the Taj Mahal every year! 2.2 million of these are domestic tourists. This perhaps accounts for the rather higher dosage of pushing and shoving that goes on, but it also accounts for kaleidoscope of colour that you are treated to when wandering around this magnificent Mughal monument. Another fun fact about the Taj is that Emperor Shah Jahan intended to build a mirror image of his vast tomb on the