Having lived and worked actively for nearly quarter century in Eastern India it is time now to raise a paean to the states particularly of North East India, which has been my playfield, in academic, educational and at times even administrative or as purely historical concerns. Never did I commit the mistake of mixing pleasure with work, taking the family with me on official tours. Mix the two and you enjoy neither. As Robert Frost says, good fences make good neighbours. In the same sense, good boundaries between work and pleasure, between academics and pleasure, make for a heady combination. Bruce Springstein sang soulfully of Romancing the Stone after having been Born in the USA, and so I thought I could do the same, raising a toast to the states of the north east, comprising Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura.