Gentlemen:
A little tip, make sure the hero of the movie is Rajnikant
The first Tamil movie we got to see was Chandramukhi. I very much enjoyed it. My friend noted that Rajnikanth was old by this time. She wants to set us up with Padayappa. But I must behave: She is my movie guru. I watched Thiruda Thiruda and got in trouble for it. The first movie she had me watch was Devdas. I had heard about it and when she got it for us, it did not disappoint. There was one part where SRK is doing this speech in his mind with his father -- I watched it and thought, "Wow! This guy can REALLY act!" Now my Wife is a huge SRK fan. When my friend brought her Aunty over for a visit, Gail commented about liking SRK, and my friend's Aunty said, "What woman doesn't?"
We are big movie fans, especially of older Hollywood movies, and Devdas in my mind is right up there with anything that Hollywood has done and is better than what Hollywood turns out now. I also have very much liked the two Aamir Khan movies I've seen, Fanaa and Taare Zameen Par. As an artistic movie, that 2nd one was a really impressive work. We also like Kajol very much, and I'm a big fan of Madhuri Dixit.
But I must be careful to watch what my friend allows. She wants to ensure we have a good experience and develop a taste for these movies, and her Bollywood choices have done exactly that. So I am sticking to trusting her for the Kollywood movies. My friend is a fiercely proud Tamil girl, and much of the interest you see me displaying here about South Asian culture has been due to the ideas she has presented to me, and also what her Aunty has told us. So I let her "drive the bus."
I am happy at your deep knowledge of India. Not everyone is so well informed.
Thank you, but I am a real babe in these matters. But the exposure to Indian culture from school has been really powerful. I worked in the lab with many Chinese folks, too -- they were/are very nice and I made some lasting friendships there. But for some reason, South Asia has really grabbed my attention over the last 3-4 years as a thing of interest.
When I was a little kid around 1960, National Geographic Magazine did a big special on Angkor in Cambodia. I read that article over an over so many times! But in my recent interest, I was watching a travel show on Angkor and it dawned on me -- this was all Hindu! Even tho it was/is something everyone else knows, there's nothing quite like having the light bulb go off in one's own head. That set me to digging about in those big South Indian empires and how they spread out all the way to Bali, and built those ancient temples in the hinterlands of Java. It was something that just grabbed me.
Also, with the SMLE 2A, it is especially neat because the 7.62 x 51 round was too powerful for the No. 1 Mk III action, but the folks at Ishapore strengthened it by changing the steel used in the action. I had read how South Asian metallurgical knowledge was very advanced in ancient times and spread West, but isn't it appropriate that this metallurgical knowledge would be used in modern times to make the old SMLE modern again? In this, it is as if the rifle is also a piece of ancient history, reflecting a knowledge that goes bank millenia.
I guess I am a bit silly, but that sort of thing is very interesting to me.
I would also recommend Belur/Halebid/Shravanabelaga in the temple list of south India
Thank you, I will look into that on the web right away!
Varanasi in the North
Oops, I left that one out! I knew a person in another lab who was a post doc from Varanasi, and she was a most interesting person.
Regarding the natural forests and mountains you mention, it seems like that is why a short visit isn't going to do. I think that to know a place, you have to get away from the major tourist stuff and get to know local people. New Mexico is very much that way. If you just see the sights, they are beautiful and interesting. It is interesting, for instance, to visit the Acoma Pueblo. But if you just do that and don't visit with and get to know the Native American folks who live there, you only get a small fraction of what things are about.
I almost think that the thing to do would be to live in a city for a month, explore the countryside, and then go to another city for a month in another area and repeat the process.
Once you know more of the match & win contest of names and parts they come from, you will also be easily telling which state they are from by their talk.
Oh, wow! For an outsider, the name-matching is almost overwhelming! But it is fun. My older son sells and installs high-end home improvements. He called up and asked me to help him on a house in a very wealthy area of town -- multi million dollar homes. He did this because he knows me and he knew his customer was from India. Well, we drive up and the peoples' name is Chatterjee -- pretty easy, that. He introduced me to the lady of the house and after a bit, I say, "Pardon me, ma'am, would you be West Bengali?" Whoa! she got pretty excited! We talked and had a great time. At one point, my son sent me downstairs for some more stuff for the installation, but Mrs. Chatterjee began talking to me on the way down. About 10 minutes later, my son walked by, got the stuff, and went back up. Later I said that I was sorry, and he just smiled and said, that's all right! I guess he just wanted to present a friendly face to customers and figured that by bringing me along, it would help his business by word of mouth. For me, these folks had some very nice Batik art of a devotional nature that was very interesting and Mrs. Chatterjee was lots of fun to talk with.
But the languages and accents? My Malayali friend will say the city names of Kerala so fast that I am often lost. I need lots of work in that area!
When ever I visited the US and ran into the NRIs staying there, many seemed to be of a sort that was mostly forgetting or ignoring their past and settling into a new future. And they eventually needed to be reminded of certain values et al
This is a very interesting thing! I have had a few of these sort of issues personally due to my ethnic background. As you might guess, I talk with many Hispanic people about this kind of subject. They are torn between Mexico and the USA in many ways. It has nothing to do with "patriotism," as some ill-intentioned people here would have you think. It is caused by having one foot in one culture and another foot in the other culture. My Tamil friend is very much like this. She is very traditional in the important ways, but she is very "American" in shopping and driving about. She would NEVER consent to marrying someone that her father didn't arrange for, but she will buy shoes and stuff that might make you think she is "changed." Her younger sister is much more American, but my friend feels a big tension over these two existences. I guess because of my own experiences, people like her have felt comfortable with me.
As far as values, in many ways I think this country is refreshed by new people coming and bringing in new ideas and ways of looking at things. I also value the different kinds of food they bring!!! ;^D
Madhya Pradesh has not been promoted as a tourist destination as much as Rajasthan and does not have as developed a tourist infrastructure as the latter.However, I think it has a lot to offer.There is greater diversity of what you can see( Orccha, Khajuraho, Gwalior, Bhopal[Sanchi and Bhimbhekta ], Indore,Ujjain, Mandu, Bandhavgarh, Kanha..). Shimla would disappoint you.There are better places to see in Himachal Pradesh.Other states/areas I would recommend beyond the obvious are Ladakh,Meghalaya,Arunachal Pradesh,Orissa, Andaman and if you have the time Nicobbar and Lakhswadeep.Chhatisgarh I have not visited but it is considered to be a beautiful area.
I have understood that Madhya Pradesh is sparsely populated in some areas and will look into that some more -- thank you for the tip! the names are very helpful. A few, I know of, and was interested in seeing. I have obtained several multipart documentaries which deal with wildlife -- especially lions and tigers. The tiger business has long been of interest to me, as we have writing here about the deeds of a fellow named Corbett and his tiger and leopard experiences. Plus, I still have not given up on the idea of someday having a howdah pistol. I've often thought that something in .577 Snider and double barrel would be fun! (A little, anyway.) So thanks again for this -- I can run that list down.
Those islands that you mention would also be very interesting. I've read some about the Nicobars in connection with military and naval affairs in the Indian Ocean, which I follow with some interest, also.
I will try to get started on some pictures soon.
Regarding hunting, I confess right now to being a very poor hunter. For the 10 years we lived in Montana, I went elk hunting all of the time. "Elk" is not the right word, as it has been borrowed from European usage. The proper term for this animal in the USA is the Native American one, wapiti. Out West, we have two species of deer, the mule deer and the whitetail. They will run about ~180 kg for a big buck. A bull elk can be twice this large or more.
Whitetail are more in the grasslands and they tend not to move around, except along well-established paths. The mule deer will be more in the mountainous areas and ranges a bit more. I think that the whitetail is smarter than the mule deer, but that isn't saying much. We are living in Texas at the moment and if you know anything about Texas, they think that everything they have is bigger and better. This is not true with their deer, which are more like a dog in size, than a deer.
Deer are browsers -- they eat trees and brush. I'm not really big on deer because they taste pretty "gamy." The ones here in Texas are a lot worse than our Western deer in this area. I can deal with Western deer in highly spiced dishes, but the Texas deer are too gamy in any kind of dish for me.
(Please -- I don't mean to offend anyone by my hunting stories. I know that some might be interested and others will not - please excuse me and pardon me for this.)
Elk, on the other hand, are grazers, not browsers. They were originally plains animals who have adapted to living in mountainous forests because of human pressure. They are not like deer: they are very smart. Their eyesight, unlike the deer, is very good, and their hearing and sense of smell is excellent. the old saying is that if you can see or hear the elk, they have already seen and heard you a long time ago.
Because they eat grass, they are VERY tasty!
A big concern with a big bull elk is getting one out after you have gotten him. With a deer, if the halves are too big to back pack out, you can quarter him. With a large elk, you may be looking at packing 45 or 50 kg out, per quarter.
When you see the movies of the elk placidly grazing and walking along at the same time, don't be fooled: they are moving so fast when they do this that a hunter who is trying to creep up on them, like a bow hunter, cannot keep up with them. Elk will move over a wide area, completing a circuit every 2 or 3 weeks. They are especially difficult to hunt when there is a full moon, because they will graze in the moonlight and bed down during the day.
Out West, we have large expanses of public land in the forests. In less ecologically minded times, they would "clear cut" the forest in large checkerboard areas. So the elk will feed in the open parks at night and then bed down in the edge of the woods during the day. Thus, they usually see you coming from a long long way off.
all of this is a big excuse to tell you that my elk hunting was never successful. The fact is, they are too smart for me. The closest I got to them was one morning. You want to get up to your hunting area before dawn and try to catch them moving from their feeding grounds to their bedding grounds. I had a place that was in a very mountainous area and got there before it was light. I moved over to a ravine that was an aspen grove. Most of our forests are coniferous in the West. Aspen are deciduous trees with distinctive white bark that grow were there is water. They grow in groves and are actually interconnected by their roots underground, so you can almost look at a grove of them and only be looking at a few individual trees. These areas will have lots of grass and the elk like to get into them to feed.
I walked down the road that cut most of this grove off, so that it was mainly below the road. After about 20 minutes, I turned around and walked back. When I got to the grove, there were the tracks of maybe a dozen elk. They had watched me walk by and once I went around the bend in the road, they took off up the side of the mountain. I tried tracking them up the mountain for most of the day, but there was no way I was going to catch up to them. I did note with interest, however, the way they chose the easiest path to climb.
Sometimes they will be in what we call "dog's hair." This is an area where lodgepole pines grow so thick that you can't hardly get through them. They will be maybe an inch or two in diameter and 15 or 20 feet tall --just like hair. Mister Big Bull Elk with his magnificent rack has no trouble getting through this, however. He just leans his head back and takes off like a big jet.
Even more impressive is the American Moose. They are the largest member of the deer family. In Alaska or Canada, they get huge. On Montana, they would get to maybe 900 or 1000 pounds.
I only once put in to hunt moose, but didn't draw a permit. They are not hard to hunt. All you have to do is find one. They will stay by a pond, where they feed on the protein rich algae slop on the pond -- that is how they grow so big. Nothing bothers the moose. They look ungainly, but they are sort of like the elephant --everything about them is designed to do a job very well. When you surprise a moose in the forest, they will usually try to get away from you and they will make a huge racket. Sometimes, when this happens, you come close to wishing you had brought an extra pair of underwear. they are big and make lots of noise when they are in a hurry.
But a moose can be so large that he will quarter out at twice the weight of an elk. So you could be looking at hauling 4 quarters that each weigh 90 kg. The trick here is to find your moose alongside the road, or at least where you can get your pickup truck to.
Moose meat is black in color and very stringy. But it is also very sweet-tasting. I've never gotten a moose, either.
I had lots of fun hunting, tho I was never successful getting an elk. I saw lots of southwest Montana by foot. Most of my hunting was what is called "varmint hunting," which is for pests. In my case, this was the Columbian Ground Squirrel. In Montana, we called them gophers, though they are not a gopher. They live in colonies like the much larger prairie dogs do. A small colony will eat as much as a cow, which is why the ranchers hate them. Also, cows or horses can get their foot caught in a burrow hole and break a leg, which doesn't make a rancher happy, either.
Nowadays, the ranchers usually poison them to get rid of them. This is bad, I think. But too many natural predators have been wiped out and there is little to keep the population down to a reasonable level.
"Gopher" hunting is a well-established pastime out West, tho not everyone likes it. I loved it. One commonly uses a .22 rifle to do this. I would head out of town on my motorcycle with a brick (500 rounds) of .22 ammo and my rifle over my back and be gone all day long. I never finished a brick, but many times, I came close to doing so.
I also took pistols with me. Sometimes, I would get bored and switch to shooting them with pistols, which is much much harder. Ranges are usually about 30 to 50 yards and the head of the gopher is smaller than a ping pong ball. I handloaded for the pistols I used, which were: a 1911 Colt .45 ACP, a Ruger Blackhawk Single Action in .45 Colt, a pair of Colt .38 Specials (6 inch barrels), one an Army Special from 1916 and the other an Officer's Model from 1920 (this one has had a target trigger job done on it and is a real dream to shoot) and a Colt Detective Special, also in .38 Special, with a 2 inch barrel.
I will get some pictures of these up for you.
My most favorite of all pistols is the Colt 1911 in .45 ACP. I have large hands and so what everyone complains about with this handgun is what makes me happy! However, when one goes out into the field, it isn't much fun to have to crawl around in the dirt looking for the cases, which go every which way. Thats why I pretty much confine my shooting semi autos at the range. 38 Special is very cheap to shoot when hand loaded, so it is ideal for gopher shooting. You waste a lot of ammo trying to hit gophers with a hand gun.
I will close now and try to tell my gopher hunting stories later. It was very relaxing and a lot of fun to do. Someday, I would like to go out to West Texas and shoot Prairie Dogs. You can't get nearly as close, but they are bigger. So a .22 is pretty much out of the question. I have been thinking about what kind of rifle to use for this, but I'll talk about that later, too.
Thanks to all for your kind words and ideas!
