What’s up with all the fighting on TV these days? I wonder what it says about our society. Anyway, I’m not complaining I rather enjoy it. I was watching Survivor Man late the other night. You should check it out of if you’re into backcountry camping etc. The guy basically treks into a place and films himself “surviving” kinda cool.
Anyway so my point was… that there was a promo for a new Discover Channel show called “Last One Standing“. I’m intrigued, they take some guys (Kickboxer, BMX racer etc.) and they have them travel and live with these tribe’s people, they train with the tribes people and compete with tribe’s people. They participants are in competition with each other to win the most points?
Anyway they do some wrestling with some Amazonians, and Mongolians. Some Zulu stick fighting, and some Kickboxing with the Naga tribesman of western India.
I have to admit I’ve never heard of Nagaland, I wouldn’t have thought to put India and Kickboxing into the same sentence. I did a little more digging and Nagaland is hill state in North Western India, it isn’t that far from Myanmar. So it all was starting to make some sense. The art is called Aki Kiti… it looks like this show was already aired on the BBC, so if you don’t plan on watching it you can find out how things turned out.
5 responses so far ↓
1 :D // Sep 19, 2007 at 5:41 am
actually there is this form of indian kickboxing which is rather similar to muay thai, except that instead of elbows and knees, they hit them with their heads haha.
2 souvik // Sep 19, 2007 at 10:23 am
are you serious nopstar that you’ve never looked into indian kickboxing? don’t want to go into a rant here, but the martial arts in india have excellent recorded history on the subject dating back to roughly the iron age. if you dig into the epics you’ll find references to krishna using clinch-knees in kickboxing matches! with all the warring tribes, india had a *huge* repository of martial arts — the influences of which trickled into china (kung-fu), south-east asia (muay boran, kali etc), pakistan afghanistan (catch wresting), russia (sambo) till india itself succumbed to the guns, germs and steel of the british empire and the arts were suppressed for several centuries. of the kickboxing forms that survive sporadically in india today, a few have an unmistakable resemblance to muay boran. why do you think they have moves in muay boran named after characters in the ramayana?
its sad that the martial arts is having such a slow revival in india today but i’m glad to see the martial arts of nagaland featured. the tribes there still go to hand-to-hand combat with machetes, swords and their bodies — one of my best friends is from there, has been in blood feuds, and damn straight those guys can kick ASS!
3 nopstar // Sep 19, 2007 at 10:44 am
souvik-
please send me an email when you get a moment.
4 Anonymous // Sep 19, 2007 at 4:33 pm
it is Northeast of India
5 Joe // Sep 19, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Hey off -topic but survivorman starves half of the time he is supposed to be “surviving”. One episode all he ate was some berries and a couple of shrimp for one week. That doesn’t qualify to me as surviving more like starving to death. If it wasn’t for his safety crew he would have died a couple of times already.
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