Mamalla the Ugandan Giant

Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, India

Mamallapuram is south of Chennai/Madras along the Bay of Bengal.  It's kind of a cheap beach resort but unfortunately the beach isn't a place where you want to spend too much time here because you could step in something alas. The town is decent enough, with your typical pink/blue/yellow/whitewashed beachy colors and thatched roofs and that kind of thing.   It's famous for its rock temples (which are in art-historical family sense,  distant cousins of the ones I saw in Dunhuang & Bingling in northern china, 5000 miles away) and they are pretty impressive, even though looking at them takes some endurance because it's crazy hot here. 

A few more random thoughts - the South of India is easier going generally than the North - and there's fresh seafood too.  The area seems to be doing fairly well even though its right in the middle of the tsunami zone.  Most of the beachfront areas have rebuilt, if they needed to, and while there's some rubble I'm not sure if it's tsunami related or just general Indian miscellaneous debris.  That said the South generally doesn't seem to have the same sense of decaying/bursting/imploding that the North does, probably because it's in an economic boom.  While outsourcing and the growth of software and high tech industries are widely reported in the US, what isn't reported is the irony of it all here.  The South of India has been inhabited by darker skinned Dravidians, while the lighter skinned Indo-Aryans in the North( who invented the caste system, a lot of which revolved around skin color to separate themselves from the dravidians) have traditonally hogged the spotlight and still do, constituting the Taj & Raj imagery with which most westerners conceive India.  As far as I could see, Northern India looked like the past to me - nice temples and monuments, a huge government bureaucracy that is more bark than bite, and a raft of problems that nobody seems to know how to fix.  Southern India seems to be the future.

There's some unique problems though, a lot like their high-tech california colleagues, the Tamils have a thing about electing movie stars into their government.  Apparently every single state gov't official (state gov'ts are more powerful here generally, the chief minister is like a Governor on steroids) is a former Tamil  movie star.  ( Contrary to popular myth,  Indian film is very very regionalized.  Everybody in the West knows about Bollywood, but the thing is only 50-60% of the populace speaks Hindi, in which Bollywood films are made, and down here everybody speaks Tamil, which is not really related to Hindi at all. So as a consequence,  there's  a Ladakhi  film industry (which is basically a few guys in Leh with a mike and a camera) that I call Bol-Leh-wood (ha!), a Tamil film industry (Tamalewood? ha ha!) etc etc etc.  Of course all the movies in the regional cinemas are identical to a westerner - man sings earsplitting song, woman sings earsplitting song, dancing ensues, repeat, but that's beside the point.

The big-daddy of Tamil movie star politicians is some guy named MDR, who kind of looks like Moammar Qaddafi because he wears a lambswool hat and sunglasses, I say this because his picture and statue is literally everywhere, by the roadside, on the streetcorner, everywhere.  Of course he was a gangster and monumentally corrupt  and actually was reelected after he had a stroke and was incapacitated at the end of his career before he died (when a legion of his fans maimed themselves by cutting of arms/legs in sympathy, not kidding).....but man they love him, and they love his last wife too, who was also a movie star and succeeded him, and was also a gangster.  She's everywhere though here.