I’m a scientist by professional training, but unprofessionally, I experiment with a few different occupations, one of which is to write sentences, particularly winding and nested sentences, sentences about rabbit holes I burrowed into, sentences about words and languages and wordplay, sentences that are graphic descriptions of my sensory experiences, sentences about art and music (particularly Indian music and my approach to appreciating it), sentences about nature, the universe, humans, their mind and their senses, and counteracting all those sobering sentences, sentences of tremendous silliness and nonsense, including sentences about birds.

I believe in approaching the universe around us and within us with a scientific, artistic and playful mind, a noticing eye, a curious nose, a creative left hand and moisturized skin. That, and being idle, being alone, and being on foot is how the most explosive sparks of creativity and insight are synthesized; those violent sparks I hope will find justice here in the form of agonizingly long sentences. This is what all the pioneering scientists and thinkers, the Einsteins and the Wittgensteins believed in and tell us, but now you’ve heard it also from a pioneering overthinker.

But what is “encuriant”?When you become curious about an inanimate object, what action has that object as a doer performed on you? Provoke? Stimulate? Arouse? All those verbs stem from a different root adulterated with spurious connotations. No existing verb conjures purely the image of an animated object planting a question in you, and that question leading to another, and another, like a trail of unknown fragrance luring you into the center of a labyrinth. What the object of your curiosity has done is to encuriate you. The world, for the curious and the encuriable, is filled with such agents of curiosity, the encuriants.What I have done here is to shape language by paralleling the form of “furious –> infuriate” to create “curious –> encuriate”. It would have been more standard to go with incuriate but it sounded more like a derogatory adjective that means “not being curious” rather than a verb that brings forth an action. This is like how the word “donate” was back-invented from the word “donation” (not the other way around!)By making you ask “what is an encuriant?”, the word “encuriant” becomes an autological wordAn autological word is a word whose definition describes itself, like the words noun, English, pentasyllabic, and also the word, word.You have reached the center of this labyrinth… because it encuriated you.