Lost in Translation

Do you know what Moringa is?

If you do, tell me one thing...did you Wiki-it or Google-it or did you just know? If you belong to the last category, then wow! I mean, really, wow!

It's not that I did not know about it but the fact that when I did find out what it was, I laughed so hard that I'm sure my landlady thought I was having a crazy fit.

Background story time: My friend/colleague/co-intern was leaving this Friday and she's been such a big help not just to me but to all the interns in my office. So when people started talking about gifts for her, I pitched the idea of a gift-set from 'The Body Shop'. People weren't too enthusiastic about it and so I decided to just do it on my own. I owed her a lot and she was such a dear to me when I first moved here. I left office a little early and headed right into the center of the city near the Dom and made my way to 'The Body Shop'. I wandered around and tried 4 or 5 different fragrances and decided on one that was named Moringa. I checked the label and it said nothing about the flower or the fragrance which was weird. But the fragrance was really nice and I liked it a lot and decided to just go for it.

But I was curious about this Moringa flower ('cause the bottle had this small white flower in the label) and kept thinking about it on the ride home. I settled down with a cup of coffee and Google cum Wiki'd it. And this is what I got:

Moringa oleifera, the word Moringa probably came from dravidian language Tamil and commonly referred to as Murungakai.

For those of you who don't get it...I'm a Tamilian and my native language is the dravidian language Tamil. And no, I did NOT know this.

And Moringa or Murungakai is a vegetable that is very common in the southern part of India. It's considered to have very high nutrition value and the plant or tree is even grown in most homes. It's leaves and fruit (or the vegetable Murungakai) is regularly included in our diet.

If my mom heard about this, she'd guffaw and say: "Murungakai scent a namma ooru la vithu paaru...kall-ala adi pattu sethu than pove". Loosely translated: if you try to sell this in India, you'd probably get stoned to death.

I wonder what other "exotic" fragrances I would find in The Body Shop :)