The Hindu : Indian 'wordsmith' has worldwide fan club

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 09, 2002

National

National

Indian 'wordsmith' has worldwide fan club

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Dec. 8. A collection of unusual English words — based on a long-running e-mailed service — has just made an Indian husband and wife team based in the U.S. instant best-selling authors.

Half-a-million `subscribers', spread over 195 countries, open their email every day to learn a new English word — unusual, fascinating, quirky or just timely. They are registered, many since 1994, to a free Internet service called `A Word A Day', and receive a new word, its dictionary meaning, a brief comment on its origin, an illustration of its usage from a recent publication and an audio clip with its pronunciation. The selection is so delightful that the site (www.wordsmith.org) and its service are hot favourites with students and teachers — and just plain lovers of the English language. There are thousands of `satisfied users' in India — clustered in unofficial fan clubs: over 800 at Infosys in Bangalore, another 500 in IIT Mumbai, among others.

The creator of the service is an Indian who did not study English till he reached high school. Anu Garg, now 35, son of a retired civil servant in Nainital, Uttar Pradesh, went to the U.S. on a scholarship ten years ago to do his masters degree in Computer Science.

To improve his knowledge of English, Mr. Garg decided to learn a word a day and when the task proved interesting he created a website to share his ``findings'' with other lovers of the language.

Today he and his wife Stuti work daily from midnight to 4 a.m. to send the approximately 528,000 emails. Creating the content takes another 20 hours every week.

A few weeks ago, when publishers Wiley brought out a compilation of the best words selected by Anu and Stuti from their 8-year service — `A Word A Day: A romp through some of the unusual and intriguing words in English' — the books, priced at $14.95, were sold out within three hours of being advertised at the Amazon.com website and another 25,000 copies have since been reprinted. The Chief Editor of The Oxford English Dictionary, John Simpson, praised Garg's ``refreshing approach to words'' while other reviewers called the book a ``banquet of words — to feast on and be nourished''.

The `instant bestseller' has made celebrities of the Gargs and thousands of fans worldwide have just realised that the authors of the cult web service are Indians.

When The Hindu contacted Mr. Garg last week, he was busy attending book-signing sessions in Portland and delivering lectures to fellow linguaphiles. Asked how he found time to run the service even while serving as an Internet consultant for AT&T Labs, Mr. Garg replied in an email to this correspondent: ``Finding time is always a challenge. I have tried to remove extraneous stuff from my life — I don't watch TV.''

Commenting on the surprise success of his book, he adds: ``It shows how pervasive the love of words is and it's reaffirming to see the book getting excellent reviews and readers enjoying it''. He also told The Hindu that he would be starting a full time career as a writer.

The Mumbai-born Stuti Garg, who collaborates with Anu and is a freelance technical editor, has her own career link to words: she runs a service called Namix, helping organisations find the right name for products.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National