Satsang "SHIRDI DIARY' DADASAHEB KHAPARDE

"SHIRDI DIARY' DADASAHEB KHAPARDE
By V.B. KherSince August 1985, the "Shirdi Diary" of the Hon'ble Mr, Ganesh ShrikrishnaKhaparde is being featured in the issues of Shri Sai Leela month aftermonth. The "extracts" of Shirdi Diary reproduced therein first appeared inShri Sai Leela in 1924-25. I deliberately refer to what was published as"extracts" for I am not sure that the whole of Shirdi Diary has yet seen thelight of the day. When the Shirdi Diary was first serialized in Shri SaiLeela, G.S. Khaparde the right hand man of the late Lokamanya Tilak hadretired from the centre of political activity to its periphery, with therise on the political firmament of Mahatma Gandhi who had cast a spell onthe Indian National Congress and the masses. Sai Baba the Sadguru andspiritual mentor of Khaparde had also passed away and Khaparde was insemi-retirement. He had ample time to look back on his life and think of hisinterests which he could not pursue in the midst of his hectic politicallife as an activist and a leader. So it was with his permission andknowledge that the Shirdi Diary made its appearance in the issues of earlieryears of Shri Sai Leela i.e. 1924-25. The reader may rightly raise thequestion on what basis I make this assertion. And he would be justified indoing so. I have to answer this query and place material available at mydisposal before the reader.
Fortunately for all of us Balkrishna alias Babasaheb Khaparde, the eldestson of G.S. Khaparde authored a biography of his father. The biography iswritten in Marathi and was first published in 1962. In the preface, theauthor has stated candidly at the outset that the book is "not a biographybut edited material gathered from Dadasaheb Khaparde's diaries for thepurpose of the biography".The hero of the biography was born on 27th August, 1854 on the day of GaneshChaturthi and was therefore named after the Lord of the Ganas. We shall nowtouch upon the early life of Ganesh only in passing. His father ShrikrishnaNarhar alias Bapusaheb who had experienced poverty in his childhood had byhis enterprise and dint of hard work risen to the position of a Tahasildar(Mam-ledar) in the British Raj in the Province of C.P. fr Berar. Ganesh hadhis primary and secondary education in Nagpur and Amraoti. He failed twicein Matriculation because he was more interested in study of subjects andbooks other than those prescribed in the curriculum. Besides, he was weak inmathematics. After matriculating in 1872, he joined the Elphinstone Collegein Bombay. He was a favourite student of Dr. Ramakrishna Bhandar-kar who wasthe Professor of Sanskrit. Ganesh had studied Sanskrit extensively in atraditional manner under a shastri during his childhood at Akola and had,therefore, an excellent grounding in the subject. Moreover, he was avoracious reader of the Sanskrit literature, and before joining theElphinstone College had already poured over Bana's Kadambari andBhavabhuti's Uttararama-Charita, So he found the Sanskrit taught in theCollege a child's play. He also enjoyed reading English literature.Professor Wordsworth who taught him English was the grandson of WilliamWordsworth, the famous nature-poet of the English language. Under these twoprofessors he acquired a sound knowledge of these two languages. In fact hisknowledge of Sanskrit was so good that he was selected unanimously to debatein Sanskrit with Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj, whenthe latter visited the Elphinstone College. No wonder that Ganesh wascomplimented by the Swami himself on his high standard of performance.
(Source Shirdi Diary)http://www.saileelas.org/books/dairy.htm