Two schools of Jharia craft innovative idols for Saraswati Puja

The spice-and-wire idol at a Jharia school. Pix: sumit sarkar. Dhanbad, Jan. 30: It will be a battle between wires and condiments and between two schools in Jharia on this Saraswati Puja. After bagging a place in the Limca Book of Records-2006 for making a Saraswati idol out of 50,000 Australian diamond cut pieces, students of Kids Garden School are at their innovative best yet again. This year, the students have used a 2,500m silver-copper wire to make the idol at a cost of Rs 25,000. But giving them tough competition would be pupils of Indian School of Learning — the oldest Central Board of Secondary Education affiliated school in the state, just a stone’s throw from Kids Garden School — who are busy crafting an idol out of spices. Giving details of the materials used, art teacher of Indian School of Learning Anjan Acharya said that all kinds of spices, right from cinnamon to coriander, have been used on the idol. The list includes 350gm of cardamom, 600gm of cumin seeds, 400gm of black pepper, 1kg of cinnamon, 250gm of bay leaves, 5gm of mace, 250gm of turmeric and 300gm of cloves. Different spices have been used for different parts of the idol. For instance, theveena has been made out of cinnamon, while sago has been used to create the face. Black pepper, fennel, cumin seeds and cloves have been used for designing the sari. Not only the idol, the pandal has been made of spices, too. It took 8kg of coriander, 1kg of turmeric, 2kg of red chillies and 5.5kg of bay leaves to make the structure. “Our students have been working on the idol and the mandap for the last month. They are devoting their leisure time to the work. The total expenditure is around Rs 25,000,” said Acharya. “The aim was to creativity and out-of-the-box ideas,” the teacher added. Earlier, too, students had experimented with a number of common materials such as bindi, supari, glass, beads, bangles, matchsticks and zari to shape beautiful idols.