Consistency & change in Bangalore as told by fun products

I’ve been to Bangalore a dozen times in my life, and in a life full of tumult and change, it’s a place that has always been a constant. Constant in its delivery of fucking delicious food, tropical evening breezes with rustling palm fronds, and me free-flowing my deteriorating Kannada vocabulary. But while I might be grounded in the consistency of Bangalore, there’s relentless change afoot there. Here’s a few fun things I noticed on my last trip there in February 2023.

Onion shampoo and hair oils. I saw this more in this February 2023 trip than ever before

Some things are things I just notice being different, or things I haven’t noticed before — like onion (yes, literally onion) shampoo. Others are representative of India’s burgeoning market, a land teeming with hundreds of millions of people for companies to sink their teeth into to get their monies. India is a place that has its own deeply rooted ways of doing things, eating, drinking, counting, you name it –– and that means brands localize like crazy. Luckily for me, the food localization usually fits my palate really damn well -– like kesar pista (saffron pistachio) flavored Snickers bars.

*Kesar pista* flavored Snickers really blew my mind.

Look up Indian or Ayurvedic skin care routines, and you’ll definitely find besan, or the flour of split chickpea lentils feature pretty prominently. So, obvi Nivea had to get in on that.

Back to food. While I’m not the biggest fan of the flavor of chickoo, I am definitely a fan of the history of it being a big fruit flavor in India, as well as the fact that said fruit flavor is now being mass-market packaged into health stores too. In Kannada, I’m pretty sure the word for this fruit is sapota, which, if you just do a little light digging, reveals itself to come from the Nahuatl (the language that they spoke in Aztec Empire- and pre-Columbian-era central Mexico) tzapotl! The fruit itself is native to Mexico, so it makes sense. But how awesome is it that words make their way around the world from places as far off as Mexico into the lexicon of sari- and panche-clad women and men in Karnataka, India?