Carambola brightly colored and unusually shaped fruits, as well as for their attractive dark green leaves and their lavender to pink flowers. Like the bilimbi, the juice of the more acidic sour types can be used to clean rusty or tarnished metal (especially brass) as well as bleach rust stains from cloth. They may also be used as a mordant in dyeing. The Portuguese word "carambola", first known use 1598, was taken from Marathi "karambal" derived from Sanskrit "karmaphala". The carambola is known under different names in different countries. It should not be confused with the closely related bilimbi, with which
The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage