The picture of patience and perseverance wedded with passion, 75-year-old Sanskrit scholar Prabhakar Apte's mission is to present the gems of wisdom enshrined in the language of the Gods to modern-day India, through his incessant and committed translation of huge volumes of Sanskrit encyclopaedias into English.

His interest in the language developed during his college days in the mid 1950s and after completing his Masters, he did a PHD on Aagamas (scriptures on enshrined image-worship and the social life governed by the temple institution) from the University of Pune. "Dr V Raghavan, head of department of Sanskrit and Yathiraj Ramanuja Swamiji from Tirupati temple helped in my research. I also visited most of the temples in Tamil Nadu for inputs,” says Apte who later went on to work at the Rashtriya Sanskrit of Vidyapeeth, Tirupati for three years in late 1970s. That's where he started compiling all matter on Vaikanasa Agama that talks of the Tirupati Venkateshwara Temple and commenced translating into English the seven hundred-page encyclopedia Paushkar Samhita, which highlights topics related to the worship of Vishnu and the Tirupati temple.

After two volumes of the Paushkar Samhita and another encyclopedia on Satvata Samhita highlighting the temple culture from Melkot, a village in Karnataka were published, he has now begun translating Samarangana Sutradhar—a treatise on engineering and architecture.

But doesn't he ever get tired of these painstaking endeavours? "These subjects are based on my PHD topics and are very interesting. So even if it takes few years doing them, I enjoy every word," says Apte who was teaching Sanskrit in Deccan College till the early 1990s.