Pages

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Padwal/Parwal

We are pretty famous in office for having the weirdest discussions ever. Right from religion, politics to vegetables. This entry is regarding a debate we had about a certain vegetable called Padwal (Potol in Bengali). I like to consider myself a pure non-vegetarian (doesn't mean I am cruel to animals and support people wearing fur. So PETA activists sod off). Now occasionally my Mom has this brilliant idea of feeding me vegetables (apparently for a wholesome diet). There is an extended list of vegetables I don't like but Padwal (or that's what I call it) definitely belongs to the top 3 most hated vegetables.

So last week, Nabdu Anna, Mr Doubtfire and myself were eating lunch when NA noticed that I was looking at my food with a face that resembled a man with no hope in life. The reason was obvious, I had Padwal for lunch. And that is how the discussion began. I said what I was eating was Padwal while the other 2 insisted that padwal was a vegetable that was long and no where resembled the thing that lay in my lunch box. To make matters worse they had no name for it. We also confused it with another similar looking vegetable called Tinda. I suggested that they were confusing Padwal with Turai. We decided that we would go to the vegetable market near the office and solve the mystery once and for all. It never happened.

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.

1 comment:

  1. 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.

    ReplyDelete