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branch, India ought to be proud of such a man with such a capacious intellect. I am afraid that in this attempt at the assessment of his erudition and scholarship, I have not been able to do a particle of justice to the sayant.
As a man he is unique. I feel puzzled when I try to compare his intellectual greatness with his moral elevation, He does not hanker after celebrity. He successfully parries all attempts of his admirers to express their appreciation of his merits. Personal honour does not appeal to him. Nobody can hope to win him by flattery, even when it is based upon genuine recognition of his worth. What he wants is the triumph of truth and love of knowledge. If a man is to be known by the company he keeps, a scholar is to be judged by the students, he has trained. Meet any student of Pandit Sukhalalji and test him and you will invariably find in him a disinterested love of knowledge. I have known from personal experience that his students are indifferent to worldly prospects and are imbued with a passion for knowledge. Such an achivement of success will not be eacily believed in the present day academic circles.
Panditji loves a life of voluntary poverty. Being a lifelong bachelor, and leading a scrupulously celibate life, he has narrowed down his material needs to the minimum limit, He fails to understand why a scholar should covet money and material passessions. Sometimes his standard appears to us as too exacting. But it has conferred an inestimable privilege upon him, viz., immunity from humouring the rich, or the man in power. I wish that we could approximate to his standard even from a respectable distance.
Pt. Sukhalalji is an outspoken man. No false courtesy or sense of etiquette deters him from speaking a truth, because it may not please a rich man or an ambitious scholar who wants to win cheap-laurels. Naturally, rich man who are accustomed to approval of all their acts and fads and also easy-going scholars, scrupulously avoid him from a