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India: Food and Restaurants
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Anant Ashram (46, Khotachi Wadi; no phone) - the seafood there is the best in the city should come as no surprise: everything is prepared by hand, spices are freshly ground and the dishes, like tiny smoky prawns in coconut curry, are cooked on a wood-fired stove. When the food runs out, it’s over. A top-notch meal for one can be had for 150 rupees.
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India: Food and Restaurants
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No Mumbai seafood experience would be complete without a trip to Anant Ashram (46, Khotachi Wadi; no phone), a mom-and-pop shop on a little village lane in Girgaum. You have to earn your meal there — you may get turned away multiple times before finally nabbing one of about a dozen tables. #DiningOutInMumbai
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India: Food and Restaurants
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At Sadichha (B-5, Gandhi Nagar; 91-22-2651-0175), in the same area, you will find an abundance of seafood thalis, platters of small dishes, served with sides and rice. Go with friends, and pass your platters around. Highlights include the rich crab masala, served in the shell, and the velvety prawn curry. Pair each bite with a bit of the chunky coconut chutney.
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India: Food and Restaurants
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Seafood in Mumbai - At Gomantak, the spicy stuffed pomfret, pan grilled, pairs well with a cooling Limca soda. The mori, or baby shark, is a more adventurous option that is both subtle but succulent. A meal for two will run you around 300 rupees, or about $6 at 49 rupees to the dollar. #DiningOutInMumbai
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India: Food and Restaurants
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Seafood in Mumbai - better to head for a few lesser-known places that serve authentic coastal seafood. A good spot to start is Highway Gomantak (44/2179, Gandhi Nagar, Bandra East; 91-22-2640-9692; www.highwaygomantak.com), a Goan specialist that’s been around for two decades. There are no napkins, air-conditioning or English spoken, but there is a focus on food. #DiningOutInMumbai
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India: Travel & Tourism
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Large bookstores in most cities in South India stock several excellent books on Indian wildlife. Two such useful guides are ''Collins Handguide to the Birds of the Indian Sub-continent,'' by Martin W. Woodcock (William Collins Sons, 1980), and ''Indian Wildlife,'' edited by Samuel Israel and Toby Sinclair (APA Productions, 1987).
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India: Travel & Tourism
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The well-prepared wildlife enthusiast should pack several containers of mosquito repellent, sunscreen, iodine tablets to purify the water, a small flashlight, binoculars, raingear, comfortable walking shoes, a hat and loose cotton clothing.
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India: Travel & Tourism
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Periyar also supports a population of over 40 tigers, as well as approximately 15 leopards, numerous sloth bears and 50 packs of wild dogs. Several troops of monkey species reside in the park, too: bonnet macaque, the endangered lion-tailed macaque, the common langur and the Nilgiri langur, whose deeply booming voice echoes hauntingly across the misted lake at dawn and dusk.
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India: Travel & Tourism
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The 300-square-mile Periyar Sanctuary in #Kerala is nestled in the high ranges of the Western Ghats. Nearly 200 land and water bird varieties flourish within the sanctuary, as do the ever-visible herds of #elephant, wild boar, chital and gaur. The park is also a haven for garden and monitor lizards, king cobra, python and the flying species of lizard, snake and frog. #wildlife
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India: Housing, Lodging & Rentals
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Though traveler resthouses are available in Masinagudi, a small impoverished village on the periphery of the park, they are generally noisy and dirty. The best accommodations to be had near Mudumalai (none are allowed within the park's borders) are Jungle Hut, Bamboo Banks and Jungle Trails.
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India: Travel & Tourism
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Bird life in all three parks is abundant. There are more than 216 bird species in Mudumalai, and over a period of several hours I spotted a wealth of fowl, including hoopoes, magpie and Indian robins, sunbirds, brainfever birds, cuckoos; jungle, hill and brahminy mynahs; jungle bush-quail, gray partridge, coucals, white-backed vultures, peafowl and rufous-backed shrikes. #wildlife
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India: Travel & Tourism
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Equally common a sight, in the most deciduous forests of Mudumalai, are herds of chital, or spotted deer, gaur (largest of the wild bovids), wild boar and congregations of long-limbed, elegant langurs. These arboreal monkeys will scamper to a safe distance when disturbed, then archly turn their inquisitive black faces to scrutinize the intruder. #wildlife
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India: Travel & Tourism
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All Mudumalai resorts are open year-round, though the best time for viewing game is during the summer months (March to June), when the tropical deciduous forests are leafless and when animals congregate around dwindling water holes. In all seasons, however, wild elephants exist in such plentitude in these sanctuaries that sightings are common. #wildlife
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India: Travel & Tourism
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During my stay at Mudumalai I saw bison, spotted deer, antelopes, elephants, hyenas and jackals, to name just a few animals; at Periyar I saw large herds of elephants as well as other mammals and waterfowl; at Nagarahole I saw most of the animals I had seen at Mudumalai as well as a #tiger and a leopard. #wildlife
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India: Travel & Tourism
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The southern tip of the Indian subcontinent possesses an abundance of wildlife sanctuaries supporting some of the most colorful, exotic and awe-inspiring wildlife in the world. Three preserves in particular - Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu, Nagarahole in Karnataka and Periyar in Kerala.
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India: Communication & Transportation
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bear in mind when planning side trips that it is rarely possible to cover more than 30 miles in an hour on Indian roads. Journeys that look short on the map can be impossibly long. Driving at night is not a good idea in a land where bullock carts and stray animals amble around in the dark among the pedestrians and pavement-dwellers.
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India: Hotels & Resorts
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If you plan to travel on from Madras (Chennai) without an initial stopover, an excellent hotel, The Trident, run by the Oberoi group (1-24 G.S.T. Road, Madras 600027; telephone 434-747; doubles about $60), is a few minutes' drive from the airport.
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India: People & Places
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Old Cochin is a busy, noisy town, but it is possible to walk around parts of it, including the waterfront near St. Francis Church, the oldest church erected by Europeans in India.
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India: People & Places
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South of Madurai, India comes to an end in the raging surf of Kanyakumari, on the tip of Cape Comorin, where the Bay of Bengal meets the Indian Ocean. A place of pilgrimage: on a pile of sea-sprayed rocks offshore, the 19th-century Hindu reformer, Swami Vivekananda, meditated before setting off on his crusade to restore intellectualism and social responsibility to India's major religion.
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India: Travel & Tourism
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Like other #temples in the region, Meenakshi Temple of Madurai is Dravidian in form, a tall, broad but slightly pyramiding tower with dark, dank interiors. The Dravidians, darker-skinned people driven south by invaders from the north, had no arch or dome to lighten their places of worship.
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India: Travel & Tourism
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A visit to the Meenakshi Temple of Madurai is an experience in the ritual of Hindu temple-going, with all its sidelights: the beggars, the merchants, the Brahmin holy men; the blur of colored sculpture that fills every inch of the soaring temple's sides; the intense faces of the devotees; the main-chance pitch of the priests who seem to run lucrative sidelines in enlightening foreigners. #temples
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India: Travel & Tourism
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South of Pondicherry, on the way to Cape Comorin, the southern tip of India, are two great cities of art and architecture, Thanjavur (known more familiarly as Tanjore) and Madurai.
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India: Shopping
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Small studios by artisans from East and West around Pondicherry are producing interesting pottery and leatherwork for shops in cities elsewhere in India. The largest collection for local sale is in the Auroville handicrafts shop, open on weekdays only.
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India: People & Places
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Most people who stop in Pondicherry are looking for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the tomb of its founder, Sri Aurobindo, and his disciple, known as The Mother. The ashram, founded in the 1920's, is an internationally known center of yoga.
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India: History & Culture
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At Adyar, one of this tropical city's greenest residential suburbs, the world headquarters of the Theosophical Society is set in extensive grounds, both arboretum and bird sanctuary. The society - founded by an American ex-Civil War officer, Col. H. S. Olcott, and the Russian-born mystic, Helena P. Blavatsky - lures students of New Age religions as well as theosophists from all over the world.
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India: People & Places
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The Madras seafront - the Bay of Bengal is to look at, but unsafe to swim in - is also the setting for Madras University and other educational institutions as well as the splendid icehouse built in 1840 to receive India's first shipment of ice blocks from America.
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India: Travel & Tourism
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Madras also has good bookshops, the best of them a tiny but overflowing treasure house called Giggles, off the lobby of the Connemara Hotel. For listings of cultural events, read the English-language Indian Express or The Hindu.
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India: History & Culture
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The first British (Anglican) church in India was built in Fort St. George in about 1678. Still home to an active congregation, it displays many historical plaques, one commemorating Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale University, who worked in Madras as a clerk and worshiped here.
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India: History & Culture
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Madras (Chennai) may be India's most attractively situated large city, strung along a wide Bay of Bengal beach from Fort St. George at the northern end of town to the estuary of the Adyar River near the south.
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India: History & Culture
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Significantly for the South, where English is still widely spoken, the British Empire in India began here in the 17th century, with the establishment of a trading post at Madras (Chennai).
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India: History & Culture
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Centuries ago, South India was the center of old Hindu empires and a civilization that, in many pockets, never fell under the control or influence of the Islamic conquerers from the Northwest Frontier or their descendants, who conquered most of the rest of India.
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India: History & Culture
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The South was the first corner of India to welcome Muslims from the trading nations across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Jewish settlements sprang up too. And, according to history that slips into legend, St. Thomas the Apostle brought Christianity to India in the first century, long before most Europeans practiced the new faith.
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India: Travel & Tourism
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Foreigners make up a small fraction of the visitors to #Kerala. For example, 515,808 foreign tourists visited Kerala last year, compared with about 6.64 million domestic tourists. Yet, foreign visitors are growing fast, up 20 percent from the year before, according to Keralatourism.org, the official Web site of the Kerala Department of Tourism.
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India: History & Culture
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Roza Bal is the name of a shrine located in the Khanyar district of Srinagar, in Kashmir, India, venerated by some Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Some people identify the sage buried there with one Yuz Asaf, that is Jesus of Nazareth, whom they allege to have arrived in Kashmir after surviving his crucifixion.
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India: History & Culture
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Together with the simultaneous Battle of Kohima on the road by which the encircled Allied forces at Imphal were relieved, the battle was the turning point of the Burma Campaign, part of the South-East Asian Theatre of World War II. Many historians consider it to be the biggest Japanese defeat of the war.
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India: History & Culture
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The Battle of Imphal took place in the region around the city of Imphal, the capital of the state of Manipur in North-East India from March until July 1944. Japanese armies attempted to destroy the Allied forces at Imphal and invade India, but were driven back into Burma with heavy losses.
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