The original seven sisters

My grandmother-in-law was one of seven sisters and the funny thing is that her father’s brother had seven sons! I don’t know anything about the seven brothers but I do know that the Seven Sisters were quite a formidable group of siblings. Each one of them was a strong, progressive woman ahead of her time in attitude and thought.They all met regularly in their maternal home with their broods and even today, though geography has divided the families, the bonds between their progeny and their descendants are strong.

More groups of seven sisters

Today, I found seven amazing facts about some other seven sisters. In fact they aren’t even sisters to begin with!

• Seven Sisters is the common name for  The Jungle Babbler which is native to the  Indian subcontinent . Surprisingly, this gregarious and very social bird is even seen in concrete jungles and spotted in cities, making quite a racket with their constant chirruping. They feed mainly on insects, but also eats grains, nectar and berries. Though they are tiny, they live long – some of them for as long as 16 + years ! They generally live in a group of 7-10 hence the name Seven Sisters.

 

 

• Seven Sisters is also the name of a waterfall in Cherapunji once famous for being the wettest place in the world. These falls are seasonal  and are a must see sight for Monsoon tourists to the north eastern state of Meghalaya

 

 

 

The Seven Sisters is a series of chalk cliffs by the English Channel. They form part of the South Downs in East Sussex, between the towns of Seaford and Eastbourne in southern England and are  the remnants of dry valleys in the chalk South Downs, which are gradually being eroded by the sea.

 

 

 

 

Seven Sisters is the name of a cluster of stars named after the Pleiads   who were the seven daughters of Atlas, a Titan who held up the sky, and the oceanid Pleione, protectress of sailing. The sisters were Maia, Electra, Alcyone, Taygete, Asterope, Celaeno and Merope. The Pleiades were sometimes said to be nymphs in the train of Artemis.The Pleiades star cluster – also known as the Seven Sisters or M45 – is visible from virtually every place that humanity inhabits Earth’s globe. It can be seen from as far north as the north pole, and farther south than the southernmost tip of South America. It looks like a tiny misty dipper of stars.

 

The Seven Sister States are the contiguous states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura in northeastern India. I have only visited Arunachal Pradesh as a child . Those days it was called NEFA and Meghalaya was still a part of Assam.

These states cover an area of 255,511 square kilometres (98,653 sq mi), or about seven percent of India’s total area. As of 2011 they had a population of 44.98 million, about 3.7 percent of India’s total. Although there is great ethnic and religious diversity within the seven states, they bear similarities in the political, social and economic spheres.

 

“Seven Sisters” was a common term for the seven multinational oil companies of the “Consortium for Iran” oligopoly or cartel, which dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970, that prior to the 1973 Oil Crisis controlled almost 85% of the world’s petroleum reserves.  The industry group consisted of:

Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP)
Gulf Oil (later part of Chevron)
Royal Dutch Shell
Standard Oil Company of California (SoCal, now Chevron)
Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Esso, later Exxon)
Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony, later Mobil, now part of ExxonMobil)
Texaco (later merged into Chevron)

The Seven Sisters are a group of seven skyscrapers in Moscow designed in the Stalinist style built from 1947 to 1953  in an elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles.

The seven are: Hotel Ukraina, Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments, the Kudrinskaya Square Building, the Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya Hotel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs main building, the main building of the Moscow State University, and the Red Gates Administrative Building. There were two more skyscrapers in the same style that were never built: the Zaryadye Administrative Building and the Palace of the Soviets.

 

Now isn’t that interesting?

This is my post for Day 4 of the second edition of #Bar-A-Thon in response to the prompt : SEVEN

p.s. All information in this post is garnered from the net save the introductory paragraph which is a personal anecdote.