Indian with 39 wives, 94 kids is the strangest story of 2011

Wives and children of Ziona Chana take part in a ceremonial e3vening prayer in Baktawng village in Serchhip district of Mizoram. File photo: Ritu Raj Konwar

An Indian man with 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren, all living under one roof, holds the numero uno position in Ripley’s Believe It or Not top 11 strangest stories for this year.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is considered to be the authority on all things odd, amazing and unusual.

The annual list of the strangest stories of the year was released by it on Thursday.

Topping the list if 11 strange stories, is the story reported by London based The Telegraph, about Ziona Chana, who lives in a four storeyed building with 100 rooms in a mountainous village in Mizoram state, sharing borders with Burma and Bangladesh.

“It’s a safe bet that Ziona Chana would not be impressed watching ‘19 Kids and Counting’ or ‘Sister Wives’ The 66 year old Indian man has 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren,” said Ripley’s Believe It or Not in a statement.

“I once married 10 women in one year,” Mr. Chana is quoted as saying by The Telegraph.

According to the daily, Mr. Chana met his oldest wife, who is three years older than he is, when he was 17.

Other strangest stories include ‘implanting organs in the name of art’; ‘Liechtenstein for Hire at $ 70,000 a Night’; ’Blind Dog Gets Own Guide Dog’; ‘Cemetery Collector with 29 Bodies Arrested’; ‘Alabama Company Turns Gun Lovers’ Ashes into Ammunition’ and ‘Mexican Vampire Woman Maria Jose Cristerna Immortalized in Wax by Ripley’s’ among others.

Keanu Reeves gave up most of his Matrix sequel money and gave it to the special effects and costume teams!

Keanu Reeves is considered to not be motivated by money among the Hollywood circles. He usually compromises with movie studios to star in big budget movies in order to be able to make smaller, quirky films. 

In 2011, he signed away $35 million from the back-end deals he had made from the Matrix sequels and gave it to the special effects and costume design teams because he felt that "they were the ones that made the movie and they should participate." He did, however make $10 million upfront for the sequels. 

This wasn't the first time Reeves has done something like this. It has been reported that he took paycuts on the Devil's Advocate and The Replacements so that he could work with Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. 

(Source)

Caterpillars have more than twice as many muscles as humans do.

Some species of caterpillar have 4,000 muscles in their body. Compare that to the human muscular system, which is made up of only 639. It’s not unusual for insects to have more muscles than humans; grasshoppers have about 900.

Still, why do caterpillars have so many more muscles? It’s for a unique form of transportation. Caterpillars use all of their muscles to move, but not in the same way that we do. They contract their body muscles, forcing their internal organs forward. When caterpillars move forward, their guts move first, and then their bodies follow. No other animal is known to move like this.
(Sources: 1, 2)

Steven Spielberg did not originally intend to shoot Schindler's List himself!

Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a man who risked his life to save 1,100 people from the Holocaust, Schindler's List is widely considered to be Steven Spielberg's best film. It earned him his first (of two) Best Director Oscar in 1993. However, his original intention was to pass on making the film!

In 1983, Spielberg convinced Universal Studios to buy the rights to the novel "Schindler's Ark," and met with the writer. He told the writer he would get started on the movie "ten years from now." At first, Spielberg was unsure of his maturity as a director to take on a movie about the Holocaust. 

He first asked director Roman Polanski to film it, who turned it down because his mother had been killed at Auschwitz. Later, Martin Scorsese was attached to the film, but Spielberg decided to do it himself, because he didn't want to let go a chance of making a movie for his children and family about the Holocaust.

(Sources 1, and 2)

There is a rainbow colored Tree

The Eucalyptus Deglupta is a tall tree, otherwise known as the rainbow eucalyptus. It is found in the northern hemisphere, in places like New Britain, new guinea etc.

The tree sheds patches of its bark and exposes a fresh bright-green bark. Eventually the color and then darkens. It it will through blue, purple orange and maroon hues. The tree sheds its bark at various times throughout the year, which gives it its rainbow color.

Google mows their lawn with GOATS!

In an attempt to be more 'green,' Google decided to not bring a lawn mowing service to cut down the grass in the fields that are next to its headquarters in Mountain View, CA. 

Instead, they rented a pack of goats from California Grazing. They said that it costs them roughly the same as bringing in lawn mowers to do the job, and they're cuter to watch. What I want to know is... why are they renting the goats? Shouldn't the California Grazers be happy their animals are being fed? 

Gandhi wrote to Hitler... TWICE!

What do an iconic peace-loving protester and easily the most hated man in all of human history have to do with each other? The answer is simple: a plea that was never heard. Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Adolf Hitler on July 23, 1939 to ask him to keep World War II from happening. At the time, Hitler was already progressing through Europe, having invaded Czechoslovakia earlier that spring. The letter never reached Hitler, (for unknown reasons) and it is hard to image that it would have had much impact if it did.

Gandhi wrote two letters to Hitler, which are on display at Mani Bhavan, where Gandhi lived in Mumbai from 1917-1934. These letters are a known, but still shocking, part of the history of WWII. Certainly, they make you wonder what could have been, and even spark speculation about what the world leaders of our time really think about the current state of the world.

There are more than 20,000 slaves buried in New York!

Archaeologists in New York have been investigating a burial site located under the busy New York streets. They estimate that about 20,000 slaves were buried under the metropolis. They've found many skeletons with filed teeth, a practice that leads them to believe that they arrived to New York straight from Africa. These slaves helped build the city back when it was becoming the economic center of the United States.

One horrible finding that has been found on these slave burial grounds is that half of the remains were children under 12 years old! Researchers speculate that it was more cost effective for slave owners to work people to death and replace them instead of taking good care of them, so they took people that were young, but ready to work.

Reattached fingers don't wrinkle with water!

Researchers saw this as a paradoxical response to fingers being immersed in water. The reason fingers wrinkle is because blood flow to the fingers is reduced, causing the bodies that regulate body temperature to lose volume and they pull the skin structure downwards. 

However, when they found that a reattached finger didn't act the same way, it made the scientists think that maybe the skin shrinking was not triggered by an inherent property of the skin itself, but rather it's activated by nerves! When a finger is reattached, the nerve endings don't function in the same way anymore, so this suggests that the nervous system triggers the response to wrinkle!

There is a breathable liquid!

Perfluorohexane is a component in which hydrogen atoms from hexane are replaced by fluorine. It is mostly used as a solvent and coolant. However, one of the coolest things about this component is that due to its molecular structure, it allows space for gas molecules to be lodged into the liquid from the atmosphere. This means that there is oxygen lodged in between its molecules in a higher concentration than the atmosphere. This phenomenom allows for animals to continue breathing and not drown!

The uses for this property are not just a novelty. The liquid is used to treat burn victims, because their lungs can be filled with this liquid and avoid problems like pulmonary edema, which is caused when the inside of the lungs have been burnt.

Google unsuccessfully tried to sell itself in 1999 for $1 million

Remember Excite.com? Neither do most people. However, they were big cats in the search engine business right before the year 2000. Back then, Google was not the behemoth it is nowadays; in fact, it was still a project from Stanford Graduate students who thought it was taking too much time that would be better spent studying. 

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the creators of Google then went to Excite and tried to sell him the search engine for $1 million. Apparently this was a laughable proposal for then CEO, George Bell. He not only rejected their offer, he also threw an Excite venture capitalists out of his office when he tried to negotiate them down to only $750,000! This has gone down in history as one of the dumbest business decisions ever. 

During World War I, France built a fake Paris to fool Germany

France decided to make a fake city of Paris to keep German planes from bombarding the real city. The fake city was built just north of the real one. There were electric lights, replica buildings, and even a copy of the Gare du Nord—the station from which high-speed trains now travel to and from London.

The plan would have worked because the radars were much more primitive in 1918. The war ended before they could finish the fake city, so it was never put to test. The only remains we have today are pictures taken back then.

Mickey Mouse's original name was Mortimer Mouse

Mortimer's name was originally meant for Mickey Mouse but Walt Disney's wife Lillian thought the original name made Mickey seem pompous. Years later, the name was used for a new character created to be a rival for Mickey.

Mortimer only appeared in the cartoon "Mickey's Rival" and was never seen again until the late 90s early 2000s when Mortimer's popularity skyrocketed and landed him roles in several Mickey Mouse related material.

Underground Skyscrapers Exist!

An underground building, known as an “Earth-Scraper” is being built in Mexico City, and will be 65 stories deep. The earth-scraper will be called "The Heart of The City", and will have a central plaza to encourage social activities throughout society.

The building will be pyramid shaped and the idea of building it beneath the soil is to keep the Aztec tradition of building underground.

During WWI, a British soldier had a chance to kill Hitler, but didn't!

In the last moments before the end of World War I, Private Henry Tandey fought in a battle near the French town of Marcoing, when a wounded enemy soldier entered his line of fire.

Deciding that he could't shoot an unarmed, wounded man, he only took aim but never fired. The enemy nodded as a thanking gestured and limped away. The enemy? Adolf Hitler. 

Tandrey was later given given the Victoria Cross, a high honor in the English army. Hitler even kept a newspaper clipping of this event and even sent his regards through the Prime Minister of England!

The Chevrolet emblem is based off of a wallpaper design from Paris

It’s a little disconcerting that the logo for Chevrolet--the company that identified itself with baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie--was inspired by (gulp) the French! Several stories about the emblem’s history exist. But according to the most popular version, Chevrolet cofounder William Durant was inspired by a pattern he saw on wallpaper in a Paris hotel. It’s enough to make Hank Hill shudder.

A spider from Hawaii has a smiley face on its back

Found only on the islands of Oahu, Molokai, Maui, and Hawaii, the happy face spider, such as this one guarding its eggs on a leaf in Maui, is known for the unique patterns that decorate its pale abdomen. Scientists believe Theridion grallator may have developed its distinctive markings to discourage birds from eating it.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Deadly Silk: Spiderwebs," August 2001, National Geographic magazine)

The average person eats 35 tons of food in a lifetime

That’s equal to 1500 pounds or 680.4 kilograms a year! In addition to the weight of the food, Americans jointly eat 900 billion calories every day!

900 billion calories, if you can imagine, is equivalent to 76,726,342.711 slices of cheese pizza! Since it takes 3500 calories to create one pound, consuming 900 billion calories would cause someone to gain 257142857.14 pounds or 116,638,038 kilograms

INTERESTING FACTS

1. The Statue of Liberty's index finger is eight feet long.
2. Rain has never been recorded in some parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile.
3. A 75 year old person will have slept about 23 years.
4. Boeing 747's wing span is longer than the Wright brother's first flight. The Wright brother's invented the airplane.
5. There are as many chickens on earth as there are humans. 
6. One type of hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
7. The word "set" has the most number of definitions in the English language; 192 Slugs have four noses.
8. Sharks can live up to 100 years.
9. Mosquitos are more attracted to the color blue than any other color.
10. Kangaroos can't walk backwards.
11. About 75 acres of pizza are eaten in in the U.S. everyday.
12. The largest recorded snowflake was 15 Inch wide and 8 Inch thick. It fell in Montana in 1887.
13. The tip of a bullwhip moves so fast that the sound it makes is actually a tiny sonic boom.
14. Former president Bill Clinton only sent 2 emails in his entire 8 year presidency.
15. Koalas and humans are the only animals that have finger prints.
16. There are 200,000,000 insects for every one human.
17. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery had in it to begin with.
18. The world's largest Montessori school is in India, with 26,312 students in 2002.
19. Octopus have three hearts.
20. If you ate too many carrots, you would turn orange.
21. The average person spends two weeks waiting for a traffic light to change.
22. 1 in 2,000,000,000 people will live to be 116 or old.
23. The body has 2-3 million sweat glands.
24. Sperm whales have the biggest brains; 20 lbs.
25. Tiger shark embroyos fight each other in their mother's womb. The survivor is born.
26. Most cats are left pawed.
27. 250 people have fallen off the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
28. A Blue whale's tongue weighs more than an elephant.
29. You use 14 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. Keep Smiling! 
30. Bamboo can grow up to 3 ft in 24 hours.
31. An eyeball weighs about 1 ounce.

Surgery existed in India 2600 years ago

Surgery existed in India 2600 years ago when the Father of Surgery known as Sushruta conducted many complex surgeries. The valuable ancient scriptures have detailed information on Cataract, Artificial Limbs, Cesareans, Fractures, Urinary Stone Surgery, Plastic Surgery and Brain Surgeries. Anesthesia was used in ancient India and one finds detailed knowledge of the human anatomy and its functions.  

Early Indian Newspapers !

India’S First General Election !

The 1952 elections had no president.

Money Value @1940 In India

 Gold price was 63p per tola. Again this is old tola which is about 12 gms. Meaning in 1940 gold price was 50 paise per tola ( 10 gms).

Genetically engineered human kidney cell shoots laser beam

Researchers have engineered a human kidney cell able to produce a directed green laser beam when struck by weak blue light. Don't get your spandex out just yet though -- it might be some years before you're able to shoot lasers out of your eyes.

Implanting DNA from a jellyfish into the cell, Malte Gather and Seok-Hyun Yun of Harvard University set about creating the first 'living' laser, according to the New Scientist. By altering the cell's genetic code, scientists forced the poor ickle bag of cytoplasm and organelles to produce a green fluorescent protein.

Unseen Rare Indian Rupee Currency Notes

First train journey in india !

This historic journey took place between Bombay and Thane, a distance of 34 kms.  On 16th Apr 1853 at 3.30 PM 400 distinguished guests, boarded the train with 14 railway carriage which were hauled by three locomotives namely Sultan, Sindh and Sahib.

The journey took 57 minutes, with a brief halt just beyond Sion for water.These three locomotives belonged to the batch of eight ordered from the Vulcan Foundry by the Great Indian Peninsular Railway (GIP) (now Central Railways) in 1852.


Some Other Interesting Facts of Indian Railways

• Indian Railway is world’s largest employer with 1,646,704 staff.
• Indian Railway is the second largest railway of the world, and first in Asia.
• A.H. Wheeler and Co launched their Indian Railway Library in 1888.

Facts about Indian Coins !

Indian coins are mainly produced in 4 cities

1. Delhi
2. Mumbai
3. Hyderabad
4. Kolkata

The production in city puts an identification mark under the year of issue. Coins produced in:

1. Delhi – have a dot
2. Mumbai – have a diamond
3. Hyderabad – have a star
4. Kolkata – Nothing beneath the year

The US has the most English speakers of any country. A close second? INDIA.

There are 251,388,301 English speakers in the United States, and India doesn't lag too far behind with 232,000,000, though the vast majority of those English speakers in India speak it as a second or third language.

That number (232 Million) is nearly 4 times the number of English speakers in the United Kingdom (59.6 Million). The UK is in 4th place for number of English speakers, behind the US, India and Nigeria. The rest of the top 10 in order are:

#5 Phillipines
#6 Germany
#7 CANADA 
#8 France
#9 AUSTRALIA
#10 a tie between Italy and Pakistan

8 Year Old Serial Killer In India

Amarjeet Sada was accused of killing at least three babies, including his eight-month-old sister and a cousin sister. Police say the boy strangled and smashed the heads of the babies with bricks & then tried to hide the bodies.

One Day Breathing in Bombay Equivalent to 100 Cigarettes a Day

Everyone’s heard the scary statistic of one day breathing in Bombay is equivalent to so many cigarettes a day. Or maybe you’ve heard one day breathing in Bombay is equivalent to 2.5 packs a day. Well it turns out that the original “one day breathing in Bombay is equivalent to two and a half packs a day” didn’t come from research and studies but from Suketu Mehta. Check this out: Even a UN report quotes the same number!

India qualified for the 1950 World Cup, but they refused to go.

The reason? Apparently, they didn't really understand what the World Cup was, so they decided not to attend. The official reason given by the All India Football Federation was that there was insufficient practice time and disagreements over team selection.

Indian Football Team captain Sailen Manna had this to say, "We had no idea about the World Cup then. Had we been better informed, we would have taken the initiative ourselves. For us, the Olympics was everything. There was nothing bigger."

In fact, the Indian team had already competed in the Olympics in 1948.

The story that they didn't play because FIFA didn't let them play barefoot is a myth. They competed in the 1952 Olympics while barefoot. 

You share your birthday with approximately 18 million people worldwide.

If we assume an equal probability of being born any day of the year (not counting February 29th), every person shares their birth date with about 1/365 of any given population.

Therefore, you sing 'Happy Birthday' on the same day as approximately 824,456 Americans, 3 million Indians, and 3.6 million Chinese. However, you would only be singing with 2 or 3 residents of Vatican City! 

A man was arrested with 2,060 diamonds in his stomach.

The man was attempting to smuggle the stones from Sri Lanka to India, but authorities were able to apprehend him at the airport after receiving a tip.

The police initially had trouble finding the evidence, but the man's discomfort during questioning indicated the true location of the stones. It took SIX HOURS for the man to excrete the 42 condoms filled with an estimated $337,000 to $674,000 of jewels! 

A man kidnapped himself for $40,000 ransom.

21-year-old Pawan Verma from India was attempting to raise money for an expensive vacation. He staged his own kidnapping and demanded $40,000 from his family. Mr. Verma was arrested when he showed up to retrieve his own ransom money. 

An Indian man spent 18 years trying to prove he was alive after he was declared dead.

Lal Bihari from Uttar Pradesh found out that in 1976 he was declared dead. After this discovery he had to struggle for years to get the government to recognize that he was still alive. Revenue officials ignored him, so he tried a number of drastic steps to be recognized by the government. This included passing out leaflets, running for office, insulting judges and public officials, organizing his own funeral and demanding a widow's pension for his wife. He even went so far as kidnapping, threatening murder, and other attempts to get arrested, just so his name would have to appear on the books. 

Why did this happen? As Bihari found out, he was a victim of a not-too-uncommon practice in his home district of Azamgarh, which is overcrowded and where competition for land is fierce. Relatives of landowners (in Bihari's case, his uncle) can declare their relatives dead in the Land Registry Office and inherit their property. Bihari met at least 100 other people who fell victim to the same scheme, and founded an organization called "The Association of the Dead" to fight on behalf of people who were wrongfully declared dead. Since finally having his official death annulled in 1994, Bihari has dedicated his time to protecting people in similar circumstances. He also has taken on the title "Mritak" so his full name is now Lal Bihari Mritak or "Lal Bihari the Dead". 

Akrit Jaswal has been a surgeon since he was 7 !

Akrit is now 17 years old, and is currently working on his master’s degree. That means, he’s not a real doctor. However, he has been performing surgery in India since he was 7 years old, when he operated on a burn victim’s hands. Akrit says that he hopes some day to come up with a cure for cancer. He is considered a genius, having learned to talk at 10 months old, to read at 2 years old, and to read English (Shakespeare!) at 5 years old. He also entered college at the tender young age of 12!

The Indian Court System is 466 years behind schedule!

There are so many cases that have yet to be heard, that it will an estimated 466 years to recover from all the backlog. Just for example, the Delhi High Court spends a paltry 5 minutes on average on every case it hears, but even racing through the cases like that isn’t going to stem the flow of judicial backlog. The court is still waiting to hear tens of thousands of cases, some of which have been delayed for 20 years. This is partly because there are not enough judges in India. There are about 11 judges for every million people in the country.

World's Oldest Living Tree -- 9550 Years Old -- Discovered In Sweden

This 9,550 year old spruce has been discovered in Dalarna, Sweden. A favourable climate has produced an upright

trunk since the beginning of the 1940s.

The Shell Oil Company used to be a company that sold sea shells !

Marcus Samuel was a London antique dealer who discovered a demand for sea shells from the Far East. He started importing the shells, and eventually created an import/export business that would eventually become “Shell Transport and Trading Company”. Marcus Samuel passed the company to his two sons, Marcus Samuel Jr. and the unfortunately named Samuel Samuel. In the advent of the internal combustion engine in the 19th Century, the Samuel brothers decided to get into the oil shipping business. For decades Shell’s business primarily consisted of buying oil in Russia and shipping it across the world. In 1907, Shell merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum to become Royal Dutch Shell, which is now one of the largest oil companies in the world.

Amazing Rare and Newly Discovered Species

Really Weird Sea Creature

5ft long 100lbs Giant Piranha

You probably all know the famous fisherman from Animal Planet’s River Monsters, Jeremy Wade.

While he was on a fishing expedition with his crew in Africa, up the Congo River, the British angler made an amazing and rarely catch : he grappled with a giant piranha and managed to defeat the monster after a serious fight.

The result was astonishing as the 52-year-old fisherman pulled out of water a 5ft long goliath tigerfish and held it with both arms for fear of being bitten by its 32 razor-sharp teeth that have the same dimensions as those of a white shark. The goliath tigerfish is well known as being one of the most dangerous freshwater fish in the world, so Wade said he was extremely cautious when he pulled it out of water.

The 100lbs monster hasn’t been caught more than a few times before because of its ferocity and its habitat, which is very hard to reach. The giant piranha seems to consume prey the same size at itself and there have been cases when others have seen it tearing apart crocodiles or even people.

Jeremy Wade’s catch, the “giant piranha”, can easily be on top when we talk about world’s most terrifying creatures.