In northern India, the native language is Hindi. However, in southern India, the native language is Tamil (as in the Tamil Tigers). Those speaking Hindi cannot understand those speaking Tamil and visa versa. Therefore, the universal language in India is English -- broken English. It is often very hard to communicate with native Indians because they only begin learning English when they start school and most never become very fluent.
The day following our visit to Pathway, we traveled to Kanchipuram outside of Chennai, once famous for its 1,000 temples. We visited four of the surviving temples. The structure and form of the southern Indian temples is different from the northern temples. These are Hindu temples. They are usually dedicated to the gods Vishnu or Shiva. Southern India is about 80% Hindu, 10% Muslim, and all other religions make up the final 10%. The Indian people are a very devoted people and religion plays a very important role in their lives and takes up much of their time and treasure.
The Chennai area is also a silk center, and we visited a silk shop and saw how the silk fabric is hand woven, but were not convinced that they had anything we couldn't live without, although the work was very beautiful.
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