date:Sep 18, 2012
he maintains that jigar stands for spirit or courage, while thanda comes from the Arabic word thandal, which stands for the captain of a ship and also the rower of a boat. (Hence the Tamil word thandalkaaran.) Such a person would need physical and mental strength, and kadal paasi (sea algae), rich in nutrition, was a staple food of seafarers. The Arabs made the drink popular, he says, before taking a detour into a dizzyingly free-associative history of Madurai. The city, at one point, was under