Retelling by DKM Kartha
काचं मणिं काञ्चनमेकसूत्रे
ग्रथ्नातु बाला किमिहात्र चित्रम् ।
अशेषवित् पाणिनिरेकसूत्रे
श्वानं युवानं मघवानमूचे ॥
kācaṁ maṇiṁ kāñcanamēkasūtrē
grathnātu bālā kimihātra citram |
aśēṣavit pāṇinirēkasūtrē
śvānaṁ yuvānaṁ maghavānamūcē ||
Amazing sight! A young girl was making a necklace of golden beads, but she was deploying glass beads in between on the same beading string (sootRam). Won’t it affect the beauty and value of the necklace ?
So a curious passerby questioned the young, apparently immature, girl: Why are doing this apparently irrational thing, mixing up things that do not go well together — gold and glass?
Pat came the answer from the girl: The all-knowing grammarian PANini also placed the nouns dog, young man, and Indra in the same grammar formula (sootRam). श्वयुवमघोनामतद्धिते ।६।४।१३३ in the ashTAddhyAyi. Why can’t I place incongruent items on the same sootRam?
The secret trick in this answer is: sootRa:-- in samskr^tam can mean two things: a string AND an epigrammatical statement usually in VyAkaraNam, or the six daRSana-s.
The meaning of the PANineeya sootRam is: grammatically, MaharShi PANini put the three words श्वन्, युवन्, and मघवन् in one सूत्रम् because those words end in the same consonant न् . They are all words in the masculine gender, and therefore they would decline grammatically in a like manner. But in terms of meaning, the three words have nothing in common — dog, young man, and Indra.
So semantically, the three words are incongruent, but in terms of grammatical form they belong to the same category.
In English, a similar set might be Potato, Tomato, and Tobacco. All end in the same vowel, o, but one is a root vegetable, another is a fruit that is considered a vegetable, and third is a leaf used as a stimulant rich in nicotine, an addictive mood changer. Here also there is a strange thing: the three belong to the same family of plants — Solanaceae!!
Perhaps, the immature-looking young girls was implying the following: Although glass and gold are incongruent because one is cheap and the other is precious, they both reflect light and therefore are similar and that is why she was stringing them together. We do not know for sure.
Anyway, by quoting the venerable PANini, the young girl (MugddhA) must have silenced her curious questioner!