
This weekend while shopping with my mom I had the brilliant idea of photographing what I called Padwal and showing it to the guys. And that's what I did today. Well when I showed them what I meant by padwal they would still not believe. To complicate matters, Ninja Hattori came in and introduced the Marathi name for the same. So now not only were we arguing about what it is called , we were also arguing about what it is called in Hindi and Marathi. A quick google search was done to make matters clear. Weirdly what google threw up sided with the guys. I was pretty amazed to see that Padwal was actually this long looking thingy (it struck me in a few seconds that I knew it by the name chichinga). One expressing my opinion there was a second round of explosion telling me that it is probably called chichinga in Bengali (which was partially true).
But then Mr. Doubtfire made a wonderful discovery on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_list_of_Indian_vegetables,_spices_and_grains
This cleared all our doubts and queries. The mystery unraveled in the following manner. What I was calling PADWAL was actually PARWAL and Padwal is also known as chichinga. So basically in some weird contorted way we were all right all along. Now as a Bong, a few things confuse me when Hindi is concerned (in spite of the fact that I have been speaking hindi almost all my life). As far as pronunciation is concerned, "R" (raw) and "D" (daw) does get a little confusing at times. I will not go into the other confusions I have in Hindi tonight :). That is a very long story!
It is weird how this sad piece of vegetable has got me amused to the extent that I actually dedicated a blog entry to it. Damn! Though my feelings toward it hasn't changed by an iota. I hated it and I shall continue to hate it.
Ai, that's not chichinga. That's jhinge. Chichinga is a long green snake like thing. Its called snake gourd if I am not mistaken.
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