This story about the scholarship of a pandit caught my attention today. Have read or heard such stories of "excellence" in the past as well. Have seen a few scholars like this as well. So I can totally relate to this.
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One thing that irks me a lot is that as a people or as a society we are putting too much emphasis on measuring excellence and worth of person purely based on monetary wealth or monetizable wealth.
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These stories offer a contrast. We had a different model of nurturing and recognising excellence. This is from a paper by Shri Ashok Aklujkar in the book - The Pandit, Traditional Scholarship in India.
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"My teacher Mr. N.N. Bhide was fond of telling the story of Bhattaji-ΕΔstrΔ« GhΔte (also spelled "Bhatji Shastri Ghate"), a pandit in Nagpur (who, I guess, lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)"
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"Ghate's area of expertise was Paninian grammar. If someone asked him a question relating to grammar, Ghate would almost always simply point to the books and handwritten copies stacked on wooden planks fixed to the walls of his agnihotra area"
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"and advise the inquirer to take down a particular volume and look up a particular part or page for the answer he (the inquirer) was seeking"
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"He would not feel the need to consult the volumes before formulating his answer. If questions pertaining to sastras other than grammar were put to him, Ghate would most of the time modestly say, "I know only grammar." "
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"Yet, when he was cajoled into writing a commentary on Bhavabhuti's Uttararamacarita, he wrote it without opening any book and by citing several authorities outside the grammatical literature"
Amazing!
Amazing!
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