Kohlrabi

I don't hold a candle up to somebody like writer V.S. Naipaul, yet, following his example, I want to write an essay entitlement Kohlrabi.

In the 1960s, Naipaul wrote an essay, Jasmine. In it he reminisces about his education in colonial Trinidad. He remembers having studied English literature, especially the poem's of a supremely English poet William Wordsworth. 

Wordsworth's poem "The Daffodils" had a profound effect on him. The child Naipaul had never seen a daffodil as daffodils didn't grow in tropical Trinidad. He thus had no clue as to how a daffodil looked and smelled. Nonetheless, he wrote a proper essay on "The Daffodils."

In hindsight, he writes, he would have preferred to write an essay on the "Jasmine" a tropical, West Indian flower.

Flowers, fruits, veggies, and such things ought to be seen, smelled and tasted before they are read of as a linguistic object, else they risk just becoming linguistic constructs in our minds.

When I read the word "kohlrabi," I, naturally, drew a resounding blank.

It's a vegetable, I learnt.

I Google-searched the term and found the above "stock-picture" of it. It looks more like an IED that the lead character in Kathryn Bigelow's movie The Hurt Locker might want to defuse.

Kohlrabi is a German turnip instead, and true to its Germanic heritage, it looks sturdy with spikes.

I mean it looks forbidding.

But thanks to the fact of being "colonized" by Google-Earth, at least now I know what an exotic vegetable looks like.