On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:20 PM, SS <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 2013-09-04 at 12:23 +0530, Kingsley Jegan Joseph wrote: >> where I grew up (Cuddalore) > > Interesting. > > I used to pass through Cuddalore (which I believe should be spelt > Cuddle-oor, which is how it is pronounced :) ) with reasonable > frequency. I studied in Pondicherry a long time ago and spent some of > the best years of my life there in the 70s and early 80s.
I do have very fond memories of adolescence in a small town, but I think it's mostly nostalgia. If I recall correctly, I was both happy and apprehensive to leave there for high school. > Cuddalore had the slowest train to Bangalore in the world - it used to > take something like 26 hours (or was it 30 hours?) for 300 odd miles. > > The area is rich with some seriously ancient history. Cuddalore is one > site where ancient Roman coins have been found indicative of sea trade > with Rome a couple of thousand years ago. Even more spectacular is the > finding of Indus valley like script on pottery in Nagapattinam south of > Cuddalore. You know, sometimes I think that Mr. Mahadevan may be as over-enthusiastic in finding dravidian connections for Indus script as some of the right-leaners are about finding Sanskrit connections. > > But nothing can beat Tiruvakkarai - a place with 30 million year old > fossilized trees which I vandalized a few decades ago. I still have the > stuff I filched. (Well actually I picked up loose bits and pieces lying > around and left the tree trunks alone. I felt that it would be > bothersome to carry a 1000 kg tree trunk on my bike) Oh yes, the petrified forest. Those trees were probably going to go study in the US and then heard about the exchange rate.
