Los,
It's exactly what you said. (use the weather radar... Properly!)
Aussiefarmer is spot on! Put the WXR in manual tilt mode and try to really understand what's around you. I've seen ppl deviate over 150 miles off track, trying to avoid what seem like really active storms, but they failed to realise that they had over 7-8000 ft between them vertically. (I'm waiting for incoming too.. "what if to have a Decompression, or what if you need to descend because of an engine failure? He he)
As for the monsoons in India, below 15000ft, most of the Red you see is just heavy rain with just a little turbulence.
It's different in Europe, where there's almost always hail.
The middle East can get really nasty too, with extremely strong convective windshear. Thankfully the storms never last more than an hour.