What could be a better way to wave goodbye to a passing year than to take lessons in art in its twilight hours? The year 2009 ended for me with a 'hands-on' Mood Indigo '09 during 21st to 24th December 2009! Mood Indigo is IIT Bombay's annual cultural festival, attracting thousands of students from all over India and Asia. This time, I could experience a bit of dullness in the festivities, but nonetheless, I had a good amount of take-aways!!
The spotlight of the festival for me was 'Garnish- The Fruit Carving Workshop'. With about a 30-odd students attending it, it started with distribution of a watermellon and a knife-blade. I was all pumped-up because the fruit-carvings were displayed right in front of us, and with the equipment in place now, it was time for some serious carving. We started step-by-step following the instructions. First I peeled off half of the oval watermelon, so that I could have one face of the watermelon to work on. Then, it was time to make an initial design at the centre of the face with the blade. With a floral design in place, I carved out the portion between the petals by initially etching out a circle linking the tips of the petals, and then fine-tuning the cuts so as to extract the portion between the required design. So now, I had a flower at the centre. The next step was to etch out more petals by starting at the tip of any one petal and continuing into the circumference of the next outer circle. Following the same steps, I made three outer petal rounds. Then, in order to make it look more attractive, the petals had to be sliced a bit from inside, so that just a green border of petals was visible with the red colour of watermelon forming the inside of the petal. This had to be done on all petals. Finally after some 2 hours of art-attack, the carved watermelon looked like this. (see photo)
A sense of satisfaction made the rest of my evening, after taking the art-work home, saving it from the pushes and squeezes of the maddening crowd in a BEST bus!
