Noni Or Nani What's In A Name?

Source :money Life:Vikram Shantal



It is a delicious irony hearing desi dudes blabber about Noni, which happens to be the Hawaiian name of a Mumbai tree called Morinda.

At first, we thought we’d misheard the Bharatiya folk, which had turned ‘Nani’ into ‘Noni’. But when they started soliciting money for starting Noni plantations in rural Maharashtra, we were sure that globalisation was truly rolling. 


Of course, it’s taken 20 years for it to reach Mumbai from the West. In the past 20 years, Noni has been hyped as one of the most important medicinal plants of ancient Pacific Island cultures, commonly known as Kura or Noni (Morinda citrifolia in Latin).

Be also warned that much of the propaganda, which has carried the plant into products outside the Pacific Islands, has been driven by a single publication of Ralph M Heinicke in 1985 and his subsequent campaign to popularise Noni for a wide range of indications including cancer treatment. 

Sad to say, recent reviews of the history of Noni’s scientific analysis have revealed that there is probably lots of exaggeration in the claims being made for its products.


 Also, these claims are not always consistent with traditional patterns of usage among Pacific Islanders. Furthermore, little effort has been made to test the hypotheses of the effectiveness of its actual traditional remedies, with the research instead being conducted apparently on recently developed remedies. Meanwhile, the prospect of earning greenbacks in extortionate numbers has, in recent years, led to commercial farming of the trees with little regard to their genetic diversity or efficacy.


More on Morinda

Apart from the extensive use of all its parts in local herbal medicine, what made the great Morinda more famous in the traditional cultures of India and South-East Asia was the reddish purple and brown dye produced from its bark. 


Thus, Morinda is responsible for the characteristic burnished amber-golden hue of authentic batik paintings. 


The tree was widely cultivated for this purpose. In fact, Morinda belongs to a genus of shrubs, trees and vines that are pantropical in their distribution with about 80 species. One of the distinctive adaptations of Morinda citrifolia seems to be its ability to colonise new islands and terrains.


 The plant grows well on sandy or rocky shores. Apart from saline conditions, it can also withstand drought. The fruits are edible - your correspondent recently had them on Devil’s Island, Australia. But they don’t have an appealing taste or aroma. That explains why, only in times of famine were the locals willing to eat them! - Vikram Shantal


Shrooming, Shalom and Soma 

Most people tend to think of mushrooms in either/or terms, which means they are either edible or poisonous. But there’s a third category: hallucinogenic.


 Of the thousands of different species of mushrooms, around 200 are hallucinogenic. Some contain the psychoactive alkaloid, psilocybin. Others contain a different set of alkaloids such as muscimol, which have long been used in shamanic rites of Eurasian people. The third group contains ergoline alkaloids, from which LSD is derived.


 They’re collectively known as shrooms and people who are fond of shrooms are called, you guessed it, shroomers (the word which entered the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary last year). Additionally, shroomers believe that the magic mushrooms are a gift of God to humankind, to make us better, happier and caring.


 Recent research has validated what shroomers have been saying ever since the banker-turned-scholar R Gordon Wasson put forward the theory that the divine plant of the Aryans called Soma was actually the magic mushroom: a US government-supported study carried out at Johns Hopkins University has shown that volunteers who took psychedelic mushrooms went into altered states of mystical consciousness. And many of them were reported lasting positive personality changes. - V. S.