Money Very Interesting

The word millionaire was first used by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1826 novel Vivian Grey.

If you stack one million US$1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton.

A million dollars' worth of $100 bills weighs only 10 kg (22 lb).

One million dollars' worth of once-cent coins (100 million coins) weigh 246 tons.

TIP is the acronym for "To Insure Promptness."

The term "Blue Chip" comes from the colour of the poker chip with the highest value, blue.

Nessie, the Loch Ness monster is protected by the 1912 Protection of Animals Acts of Scotland. With good reason - Nessie is worth $40 million annually to Scottish tourism.

Of the more than $50 billion worth of diet products sold every year, almost $20 billion are spent on imitation fats and sugar substitutes.

Annual global spending on education is $80 billion.

US and European expenditure on pet food is $17 billion per year.

The global expenditure on healthcare and nutrition is $13 billion.

Money notes are not made from paper, it is made mostly from a special blend of cotton and linen.

In 1932, when a shortage of cash occurred in Tenino, Washington, USA, notes were made out of wood for a brief period. The wood notes came in $1, $5 and $10 values.

The world's largest coins, in size and standard value, were copper plates used in Alaska around 1850. They were about a metre (3 ft) long, half-a-metre (about 2 ft) wide, weighed 40 kg (90 lb), and were worth $2,500.

The first credit card was issued by American Express in 1951.

About 30% of consumers use their credit card as their main means of buying Christmas goodies, 70% do not save to buy Christmas gifts and 86% of consumers do their Christmas shopping during December.

Excessive use of credit is cited as a major cause of non-business bankruptcy, second only to unemployment.

Statistics show that people with high, medium and low income groups spend about the same amount on Christmas gifts.

In the 1400s, global income rose only 0,1% per year; today it often tops 5%.

The average age of Forbes's 400 wealthiest individuals is 63.

In 1955 the richest woman in the world was Mrs Hetty Green Wilks, who left an estate of $95 million in a will that was found in a tin box with four pieces of soap.

In 2001 the richest woman was Liliane Bettencourt, the daughter of L'Oreal's founder. She has a net worth of $14 billion (depending on how the stock market did today).

In 2000, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is the second wealthiest woman, with $5,2 billion.

Queen Elizabeth II is one of the 10th wealthiest women in the world.

The $ sign was designed in 1788 by Oliver Pollock.

The term "smart money" refers to gamblers who have inside information or have arranged a fix, the gambling term for insuring the outcome of an event by illegal methods.

Small-time gamblers who place small bet in order to prolong the excitement of a game are called "dead fish" by game operators because the longer the playing time, the greater the chances of losing.

In gambling language, for a gambling house a "sure-thing" is a wager that a player has little chance of winning; "easy money" is their profit from an inexperienced bettor, an unlucky player is called a "stiff."

Australians are the heaviest gamblers in the world; an estimated 82% of Australians bet. That is twice as much per capita as Europeans or Americans. Yet, Australia, with less than 1% of the world population, has 20% of the world's poker machines.

There are more than 7 million millionaires in the world.

80% of millionaires drive second-hand cars.

In 1900, the price of gold was less than $40 per ounce. It reached $600 in 1930, now struggling to reach $400 per ounce.

If Los Angeles County was a country, it would be the 19th largest economy in the world.

If California was a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world.

Tobacco is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cigarettes a year - about 1,000 cigarettes for each person on earth.

In 1965, CEOs earned on average 44 times more than factory workers. In 1998, CEOs earned on average 326 times more than factory workers and in 1999, they earned 419 times more than factory workers.

The income gap between the richest fifth of the world's people and the poorest measured by average national income per head increased from 30 to one in 1960, to 74 to one in 1998.

A third of the world's people live on less than $2 a day, with 1,2 billion people living on less than $1 a day.

In the 17th century, wool fabrics accounted for about two-thirds of England's foreign trade. Today, the leading wool producers are Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and China.

The NASDAQ stock exchange was totally disabled in on day in December 1987 when a squirrel burrowed through a telephone line.

In 1990, the word "recession" appeared in 1,583 articles in The Wall Street Journal.

Global sales of pre-recorded music total more than $40 billion.

Tourism is the world's biggest industry, affecting 240 million jobs.

In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.

Land of socialism, Tendulkar and tigers

If one were to single out an Indian journalist whose name has evoked instant reactions across the land for the longest time, one would not look beyond Khushwant Singh. No other man could be remembered for two achievements so different as revealing the existence of the female torso to the incredulous readership of the formerly staid Illustrated Weekly of India and returning his Padma Shri to an equally stunned President Zail Singh.

Khushwant Singh is revered by many for making bluntness and candour respectable in a profession that thrived on euphemism and ellipsis, for teaching journalists that it was not incompatible with their trade to get up from their desks, and for showing readers for the first time that writing was meant to be enjoyed as much as admired. He is condemned by an equal number of critics for what they see as his salivating lasciviousness, his tiresomely idiosyncratic obsessions and his complete lack of either taste or discretion. No English-speaking Indian reader is neutral about Khushwant Singh: the one thing he does not do is leave his readers cold. May he live to be a hundred, and may he continue to amuse, delight and provoke well past that landmark.

Socialism: Is the political credo of India’s left wing. It was also the credo of India’s right wing (remember when the BJP claimed ‘‘Gandhian Socialism’’ as its ruling ideology?), its centre, its ruling party and all its editorialists. You could own land, fancy apartments and cars and call yourself a socialist; the dominant principle of Indian socialism is ‘‘do as i say, not as i do’’. It’s only since 1991 that it has become acceptable in India for some people not to be socialists, but the vast majority still pay lip-service to the creed, whether or not they implement its tenets in policy or practice.

Tagore, Rabindranath: Is the Shakespeare of the country, our greatest litterateur and a genius on the da Vinci scale, who wrote novels, short stories, plays, poems, and songs, who founded a new discipline of music (Rabindra Sangeet) and a new university of the arts (Santiniketan) and whose work, even in a poor translation, won India’s first Nobel Prize (and its only one for Literature).

Tagore towers over India’s cultural consciousness. His ‘Gitanjali’ still evokes admiration wherever it is read; his ‘Kabuliwallah’ is among the few short stories most Indians remember; and his famous poem, ‘‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’’, inspires generations of Indian school-children long after the context of its composition has been forgotten. Tagore is also the only human being in the world to have composed the words and music to two separate national anthems, those of India and Bangladesh. Rabindranath Tagore would have won immortality in any of his chosen fields; instead he remains immortal in all.

The Taj Mahal: Is the motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. How easily one forgets that this unequalled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered 13 times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the 14th attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate as a symbol of India - a land of beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.

Tata: The dynasty that long represented the acceptable face of Indian capitalism: efficient, progressive, productive, honest, profitable and socially conscious. The Tatas gave India its first indigenous steel industry, its first five-star hotel, its first company town (Jamshedpur) and its first airline.

When Jamsetji Tata set up India’s first steel plant in the late 19th century in the teeth of British opposition, a prominent Englishman dismissed the endeavour by saying that he would personally eat every ounce of steel an Indian was capable of producing. Last year, the Tatas purchased British Steel (as part of Corus).

I am not sure which is more symbolic of the reversal of fortunes - that an Indian company now owns British Steel, or the earlier purchase by the Tatas of the premier British tea company, Tetley’s. That each sup of Tetley’s tea puts money into Indian coffers is poetic justice for which we must always be grateful to Tata.

Tendulkar, Sachin: The sobriquet ‘Little Master’ was already taken, but Sachin Tendulkar was our sole ‘Boy Wonder’. By the time he was 14, people were speaking of him as potentially India’s greatest batsman ever, and after breaking onto the international scene as a precocious 16-year-old, he proceeded to fulfil that potential brilliantly. His records will long remain the stuff of cricketing legend, but what future generations will never know is the extraordinary weight of expectation that Sachin carried on his young shoulders every time he went out to bat, and the palpable sense of deflation that accompanied his every return to the pavilion.

Tigers: Are India’s most significant, yet most fragile, conservation achievement. In 1900 there were about 35,000 tigers in India; by the time tiger shooting was banned under a 1972 law there were only 1,872 left, a decimation rate of 95% in 70 years.

Thanks largely to Project Tiger, established in 1973, that figure has slowly climbed up towards 3,000 again. The problem is that the tiger remains gravely endangered and conservation requires political sacrifices that are not easily made, notably relocation of villages to create tiger sanctuaries, and maintenance of adequate prey to sustain tiger populations.

Tigers need large areas of land relatively free from incompatible human uses, but how can India reconcile the agreed ecological goal of protecting tigers with the pursuit of equitable socio-economic development for the people of the affected areas? The PM’s ‘Tiger Task Force’ came up with ideas that, conservationists agree, have not yet solved the problem. Unless real political will is put behind it, India risks the extinction in the wild of this magnificent specimen of our natural diversity.

Bachendri figures in book on 60 visionaries since independence

Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman and fifth in the world to climb the Mt Everest, is the only woman to have made it to the 'India Extraordinaire-60 years, 60 Luminaries' - a coffee table book to commemorate 60 years of independence.

Put together by Coca-Cola India and the Limca Book of World Records, the limited edition compilation dwells on the extraordinary contributions by 60 Indians in various fields since 1947, including entrepreneurs, stalwarts in the art and entertainment world, and other relevant fields.

Pal, the chief of adventure programme of Tata Steel, is the only woman to find reference in the adventure section and acknowledged as one of the major contributors to the development of modern India, according to a release by Tata Steel here.

Some of the personalities in the compilation were JRD Tata, Mother Teresa and Sachin Tendulkar.

Pal was one of the six women and 11 men who successfully summited Everest during the1984 expedition.

The very next year, in 1985, she led an all-women Indo-Nepalese Everest expedition, which created seven world records and set benchmarks for Indian mountaineering.

Nine years later, in 1994, she led another all-women team which coursed through the waters of river Ganga traversing 2500 km from Haridwar to Kolkata.

Summing up her mountaineering adventure, Pal said, "Mountains teach you to deal with critical situations. They force discipline and instill leadership qualities, humanity, courage, self-respect and confidence, besides bringing one in contact with people from different areas and cultures."

Incidentally, this tough woman was the first girl from her village to complete her graduation.