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INDIA India is one of the oldest civilizations in the world with a kaleidoscopic variety and rich cultural heritage. It has achieved all-round socio-economic progress during the last 62 years of its Independence. India has become self-sufficient in agricultural production and is now one of the top industrialized countries in the world and one of the few nations to have gone into outer space to conquer nature for the benefit of the people. It covers an area of 32,87,263 sq. km, extending from the snow-covered Himalayan heights to the tropical rain forests of the south. As the 7th largest country in the world, India stands apart from the rest of Asia, marked off as it is by mountains and the sea, which give the country a distinct geographical entity. Bounded by the Great Himalayas in the north, it stretches southwards and at the Tropic of Cancer, tapers off into the Indian Ocean between the Bay of Bengal on the east and the Arabian Sea on the west. The Indian economy   is the...

For all who witnessed it there was the inescapable sense that here was a matchless act of high theatre, resonant with history, tradition and the inescapable feeling of the institution of the monarchy being reshaped before our eyes. Catherine Middleton was the first untitled woman to marry a prince in close proximity to the throne in more than 350 years, since Anne Hyde wed the Duke of York, later James II, in 1660. In an illustration of unparalleled social mobility, having walked up the aisle as Kate, a history of arts graduate from Berkshire, whose ancestors include, on her mother’s side Durham miners and on her father’s, five generations of stolid middle-class solicitors, the new bride walked down it the Duchess of Cambridge, and the future Queen Catherine, the sixth to bear that title. We were told that this would be a relatively modest wedding.   Relatively, an occasion geared to the imperative to strike a balance between a consideration for the austerity of the times, ...