One World, Many Words

At this Max City-VoW Litfest, let me dwell on the theme ‘One World, Many Words’, as well as on Max City and VoW! The keyword, of course, is the ‘word’—for nothing can exist without it. And then we shall try to understand its relation to the world, the host city, and VoW—the organisation that has extended its curatorial support to this festival. So from the Valley of Words, it is now Words on Waves, for the Maritime History Society of India is a partner in this endeavour.

As this is the Easter Week, let me take a moment to recall the Gospel (King James Version): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Thus, it was the word which created the world. In the Vedantic tradition, the relationship between the word and the world is more nuanced. The eighth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is the Akshar Brahma Yoga. The ‘word’ is called Akshar—the imperishable and the eternal—as against ‘Kshar’—the temporal which constitutes the world. The Lord Almighty identifies himself with Akshar. In the Sikh scriptural tradition, the word of the Guru (Gurbani) has been elevated to divine status—the living Guru. The Muslims believe the Holy Quran to be the literal, uncreated word of God (Allah), revealed in Arabic to the Prophet Muhammad. For the Jews, the Torah is the word of God.

Thus, in both Judaic and Brahmanical traditions, the word is supreme. For it is this word which helps us define our world. As civilisations evolve, we need more words in the lexicon to explain the many different nuances. For that matter, the foundational architecture of all AI—Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek—is the large language model, based on the algorithm of the most probable sequence of words.

The World We Inhabit

What is the nature of the world we inhabit? Well, at one level, it is just one world—even though every single individual would have their own way of describing it. But we have to remember that even though there is one world, there are an infinite number of worldviews—and infinite ways to describe them. Words are evolving all the time to get to the most proximate understanding of the world. However, even when the world has transitioned from that particular reality, the words used to describe an extant circumstance continue to live long thereafter. It is true that words can change their meaning over time, but the frequency of their use may come down—but the word can never really become a vestigial organ. It is through words that memory is preserved, and memory is the seed from which great literature is created. Not every seed germinates, but even those that do not become part of the value chain find a manifestation. Nothing is ever lost!

As this Litfest is being held in the Maximum City, let me also talk about Suketu Mehta, the author of the eponymous book on this metropolis, for it also lends its name to the festival. This descriptor has stuck to the city not because it was notified in the sarkari gazette, or the manifesto of a political party, or a resolution of the Legislative Assembly. It is Max City Litfest, for this resonates well with the city: its joys, its frustrations, its ambitions, its glamour as well as its grime. It encapsulates the agony and the ecstasy of its teeming millions, as well as the elite layers, because everything this city does is ‘maximum’, which Gen Z now calls Max!

This is the year when the Census of India is being held after a hiatus of fifteen years, as against the normal frequency of ten. This will bring, in its wake, an empirical verification of two interlinked anecdotal truths: that India is urbanising, and India is now home to large swathes of interstate migration—thereby bringing some dissonance between the state and society. This is so aptly captured in Mehta’s recent book This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, in which he shows how metros and cultural spaces are created by the intermingling of peoples who speak multiple tongues, wear multiple identities on their sleeve, bring different skill sets to the table, and create a new world—which then looks for words to describe it—thereby creating a virtuous cycle of words and the world!

Let me also share my favourite example about the evolution of words in the English language, and how it has come to dominate the world of governance, banking, commerce, culture, science, technology, peace, and war. When Shakespeare wrote his Macbeth and The Tempest, his Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice (illustrative examples), in the sixteenth century, he used over 30,000 words to describe the entire range of human emotion. When Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language in 1775, he listed more than 40,000 words. But hold on—the Oxford English Dictionary of 2026 has over 5,20,000 entries, with 880,000 meanings, and the usage examples run into millions.

Let me end by quoting my favourite lines from an exiled poet of this city, Salman Rushdie. The closing lines of his Victory City read as follows:

I have lived to see an empire rise and fall

How are they remembered now

These kings... those queens

They exist now only in words

While they lived, they were victors or vanquished, or both

Now they are neither

Words are the only victors

What they did or thought or felt

No longer exists

All that remains is the city of words