Nepal, Oct. 29 -- In the heart of Rome's Piazza Navona stands one of the city's most famous fountains: Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, the 'Fountain of the Four Rivers'. Designed in 1651 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for the then-Pope, Innocent X, the fountain depicts the major rivers of the four continents where papal authority had spread: the Nile, Danube, Rio de la Plata - and the Ganges

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For the average Western tourist, it's an impressive sight, a grand spectacle. For the average Indian, too, it is that, and perhaps too an evocation of pride: this is our river, our Ganga. (It's a different matter that Bernini's Ganga is a muscular and heavily bearded man, not at all the makara-riding goddess Indians know her as).

But, inaccuracies and all, B...