Vision and Wisdom

Swami Kuvalayananda born in Dabhoi in Gajarat on 30th August 1883, Jagannatha Ganesha Gune joined a college in Baroda after his matriculation in 1903, quite a late age for someone like him to pass that secondary examination. On the very first day in his class the Sanskrit teacher started teaching Bharthari's Nitisataka the first verse of which reads as follows: Ajnah sukhamaradhyah sukhataramaradhyate visesajnah; Jnanalavadurvidagdham brahmapi naram na ranjayati. (Easy is it to satisfy an ignorant person; easier still is it to satisfy a learned person. But even the cretor cannot please a fellow who is endowed with a little of knowledge but who is not clever enought). Gune shot his first question to the teacher: "Sir, why is it sukhataram? Should it not be sukhataram grammatically?" The question had something to do with the adjectival and adverbial forms respectively of a given word. The teacher was a bit taken aback at the question. Instead of answering the question, he said: " So. you are Gune who studied earlier in Poona. I am glad you have come here. But you know the answer yourself, I guess. Please tell it to others also in the class." With some hesitation, the boy hazarded a guess which proved to be the right anser. After all, he had been trained by the legendary vinayakrao Apte at the school in Poona in 1898 and 1899, the school presently called the Nutan Marathi Vidyalaya to which Swami Kuvalayananda owed more than he could simply thank it for, as evedenced by a letter he wrote in 1963. This was recounted to me by Swamiji himself way back in 1963 in the course of a casual conversation. I suspect that he was trying to elicit the answer for that question from me so that he could measure the depth of my own knowledge of Sanskrit grammar which was, and unfortunately also continues to be, meagre. It was during this conversation that he also tole me how he came to take the name " Kuvalayananda' in 1923 or thereabouts.  ....