Gadsby: Fifty thousand words without an ‘e’

There are very, very few words in the English language where vowels aren’t used. And ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language. There are 22 ‘e’s in the previous two sentences alone! Then, imagine how much difficult it must have been to write Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel without the letter ‘e’! Except for the introduction and the note at the end, you won’t find the letter ‘e’ used anywhere.

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Unsung heroes of India: U Kiang Nongbah

The Jaintia Kingdom was an empire that ruled for around three centuries, in present-day Bangladesh and northeast India. The kingdom fell into British hands in the year 1835. King Rajendra Singh, their last ruler, was now deprived of his kingdom. The brutal British rule led to to an uprising led and guided by a brave young man called U Kiang Nongbah.

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Edmund Hillary and the Three Poles Challenge

We all know of Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand as one of the first two to climb the world’s highest summit, Mt Everest. He also had another feather on his cap: He was the first person to have reached the three extremes – Mt Everest, the North Pole and the South Pole. Thus, the Three Poles Challenge was born.

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Vinicunca: The Rainbow Mountain

A four-hour journey from Cusco city in Peru, and along the Peruvian Andes, brings you to a region with colourful mountains – some coloured in brick-red, some in lavender, some in greenish-blue. This is due to the sediments present in the soil, and the atmosphere. But the most unique of all these mountains is Vinicunca, or ‘the rainbow mountain’.

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