[Music: guitar strumming]
Hello everybody, so what I have here is a fruit that I cannot eat...
unfortunately, but there is quite a bit to talk about. It’s very important fruit for Hindus here in India.
And this is the Rudraksha fruit, which is used...
religiously - Not the fruit itself, but the seed on the inside, is used religiously.
The fruit that this is is an Elaeocarpus fruit.
They do produce..like some of the species, I believe, are edible.
There’s one that’s a very like vibrant blue-looking one.
I’m not sure if they’re all blue. This one is obviously not. It’s more like stone-colored
fruit, but it could also be that it was picked
ages ago, maybe early, you know, it’s not picked to be eaten.
I even asked him, like, “Can I eat this?”, and he’s like “What? ..
No.” ...like this is sold purely for the beads on the inside or the seeds on the inside to make beads.
It smells kind of um...
Hm, like rancid peanut butter, so...
yeah, not so super good. Maybe a little bit like the ber fruit or like a date kind of fruits...
the jujubes, like something like that, but like if it went bad.
Um, yeah, so not something you’re gonna want to eat, but...That’s actually kind of funny. This does...
Oh...you know what?
I believe...
this actually might be related,
because look, this is like one of the ber fruits that I picked up.
This is the...the other for you. It looks actually...very similar [laughs].
It’s just like this is darker. Huh, interesting. And I haven’t really taken a real good
look at the seed of this, so let’s compare! Maybe this is uh actually related.
The guy selling this, he was selling a whole bunch of the different beads.
I believe people
remove them from these fruits, and then they dry them out.
So here is the cross-section of the fruit, and...
take a moment to just kind of appreciate what this looks like.
Maybe a little difficult to see, but it’s got five sides to it.
You can see the little teeny lines separating each side.
So there's one...
two...
three...
four...
five. That's supposed to be
significant towards Shiva believers.
There’s like five phases to Shiva, so there’s five sides to this fruit, so it’s supposed to be, you know,
especially like auspicious. People who wear it, they believe that Shiva is watching over them...
bringing them good will, good fortune. So it’s kind of like a good luck charm.
And usually they don’t wear just one, like sometimes you can, or just like one around a necklace or something...
but usually it’s like an entire like strand. Typically men only will wear this.
Here is a cross section of the ber fruit. You can see that they are a little similar, and...
I took a minute to this up online, and...
they are related, but distantly. They’re not the same
species. They’re not the same genus. They’re not in the same family.
One more step. [laughs]
They’re in the same order, so that is...that's pretty distant.
So that might give some explanation to the shape of them being similar...
But it does go to show that there’s the vast difference
between, you know, one and the other.
So I got as much of the flesh off as I could, and you can see a little bit more like the five sides of it.
It’s uh...yeah, it's very cool looking.
I love this seed, especially when it dries out a little bit and you get the rest of the flesh off.
It's got a very interesting appearance to it.
With all the different fruits out there in the world...
a lot of them have significance even if they’re one that you cannot eat.
There are fruits out there that are used for jewelry...
but there’s a lot of religious significance to fruit or medicinal significance to fruit.
Fruit is important. It’s an important thing for a lot of people.
Its got a lot of cultural significance, religious significance, and...
this is something that is interesting to me specifically, because...
I live now in an Indian community in in New York City.
If you walk around my neighborhood...
you'll see people who are selling like religious stuff on the side of the road...
So they'll have bright bracelets and necklaces and like little religious pamphlets and
incense burners and stuff like that for people who practice Hinduism.
I’ve seen these, and I never really gave a second glance.
So the next time I walk down the street in my neighborhood, and I see someone selling these...
I'm not gonna look at it the same way.
All right, until next time, guys. Bye. Hey before you click out...
there’s going to be a preview of the next week’s fruit at the end of this video, so don’t go anywhere.
I want to give a shout-out to
Dr. Jamie Koonce, who has a website drjamiekoonce.com.
She was a very generous contributor over on Patreon,
and Patreon is how this show happens. So if you want to learn more about how you can help me out...
check out the link in the description below or that’s around me right now.
I also have t-shirts for sale. Here’s the latest one with the Mandrake root on it...
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Thanks so much, bye-bye.