BY VEENA RAO*
Pune, India, December 28, 2024: In a dazzling display of linguistic wizardry, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, former international diplomat, Member of Parliament, author, and India’s unofficial logophile-in-chief, conjured up four brand-new English words on the spot at the Pune International Literary Festival (PILF). The session, moderated by PILF founder Dr. Manjiri Prabhu, was a highlight of the 12th edition of the festival, held at Yashada in Pune on December 15 and 16, 2024.
The overpacked auditorium, filled largely with Tharoor fans, watched as he gamely accepted Dr. Prabhu’s challenge to invent words for complex emotions and ideas that English currently struggles to express.
Prabhu set the stage by asking Tharoor to create a word for “the feeling of being one with the universe.” Without missing a beat, Dr. Tharoor combined Greek, Latin, and English roots to birth omnivistatude (omni means all encompassing, vista means universe, and tude as in solitude, fortitude)— a word as cosmic as the concept itself.
Next came “the sense that you’ve known someone across lifetimes.” Dr. Tharoor dipped into Sanskrit for atma (soul) and French for ami (friend), crafting atmami, a term that evokes a sense of deep connection.
For “unconditional love that transcends life,” Dr. Tharoor fused the Latin aeterna (eternal) with the French amour (love), giving the world aeternamour.
Also, in a nod to his mother tongue Malayalam, he proposed wheth — an English counterpart to ethraavate, a word denoting the ordinal position of an object or person.
“In my mother tongue, Malayalam, there is a word that has no direct English translation. Ethraavate means “which number position is that person or object in.” Reflecting on this, I realized that while English has words like “when,” “why,” and “what,” it lacks a term like “wheth” to express this idea,” he said.
Dr. Prabhu playfully concluded by bestowing a word upon Tharoor himself: charinspirer. She said the word is a portmanteau of four words—charm, charisma, inspire, and aspire—capturing Tharoor’s unique ability to inspire through charisma and charm, while also being someone people aspire to be like.
The session wasn’t just about creating new words but a discussion on words and their role in culture, identity, and evolution. Dr. Tharoor read excerpts from his book, and shared witty anecdotes about his father’s word games and the “unofficial Tharoorosaurus” of sesquipedalian terms he’s brought into mainstream discourse.
The book itself, A Wonderland of Words, is a treasure trove for language enthusiasts, exploring the origins, quirks, and evolving landscape of English. It explores everything from slang’s subversive charm to the nuanced diplomacy of punctuation marks.
PILF, with its eclectic lineup of authors, poets, and thinkers, was the perfect stage for Dr. Tharoor’s verbal pyrotechnics. The audience left armed with five new words to sprinkle into their own lexicons.
*Veena Rao is the founding editor of NRI Pulse and the author of Purple Lotus.
Cover photo: Dr. Shashi Tharoor speaking at the Pune International Literary Festival 2025. Graphic designed by NRIPulse.
