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“This
is India! The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous
wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags,
of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence,
of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers
and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country
of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of
a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle
of the human race, birthplace of human speech,
mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother
of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with
the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the
nations—the one sole country under the sun
that is endowed with an imperishable interest
for alien prate, for lettered and ignorant, wise
and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one
land that all men desire to see, and having seen
once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse
for all the shows of all the rest of the globe
combined.”
- Mark Twain
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