Hi again.... this is one more activity which I pursue usually in quiet moments. It is one of the most relaxing things I do. And because it does not involve any physical exertion from my side, I am usually at my lazy best!!! 

I picked this hobby from one of my friends Dad. His name is Mr.Vasant Kulkarni. His son was in my class in school and frequent trips to his house got me interested in his Dad's hobbies. Incidentally, I forgot to tell you that his Dad is an artist and does a whole lot of things like carving, painting, clay modeling etc. So, I picked this activity up, starting slowly from trying my hand at carving in chalk and slowly worked my way up to wood. 

A lot of times I worked on wood I found lying on the roadside dumpster, but that was the beauty of it all. Some of the best pieces which I made were from wood which mankind had deemed worthless!!! :-) 

I have a long way to go. But the reason why I do wood-carving is not because of the outcome. Its because I immensely enjoy chipping away at wood. In school me and a bunch of friends used to while away class time sharpening pencils with a blade. And believe me its real fun to do that!! Especially when you can show that the sharpened pencil looks better than one done with a sharpener! That was the beginning. I cant resist mention an episode in which a couple of us were working on erasers making stamps out of them. One of my friends, (Nimish Raote) was desperately trying to get the erasers away from us and he did! No sooner did he do that, the teacher caught him not paying attention and exemplified attentiveness with the attention I was paying!!! 
;-)

I have been experimenting with 
1.Pencils
2.Sandalwood
3.Supari(betel nuts)
4.Wild wood
5.Balsa

To see what I'm currently engaged in click here

Hereis one of my first attempts. In my undergraduate institution I startedcarving as a alternative to paying attention in my lectures. First it waschalk as the medium. Basically because it was so freely available. ThenI turned my attention to wood in pencils.  My favorite subject is LordGanapati. That is because it gives me so much of freedom to make mistakes!;-) Lord Ganapati is an Indian God with a human body and an elephants head.  Carving in pencil wood isnot as easy as I thought because of the long grain that the wood has. Thismakes splintering the wood very easy and cutting cross-grain is especiallytricky. For the idol in the image, I used a small screw-driver which Isharpened. The pencil is shown to given an idea of the size of the actualcarving.

Gainingconfidence in pencils, I then turned my attention to sandal wood. My firstpieces of wood I bought from small shops in South Bombay. This pieces Ibought for Rs.80 ($2) which at that time was more than one weeks allowance.But that was the fun part as it made me do justice to the wood I bought.This piece I carved actually had three figures carved into it. But I sawedoff one just to see how it looked! (Which I realized was a mistake!) Working in sandal wood isout of the world! It has such a fine grain that it really doesnt matterif you work cross-grain. Especially cutting cross grain is a pleasure asit just make you realize how beautiful the wood is!!

Supari (Betel nuts)

Working with betel nuts is easy. This is because the wood is so soft and secretes a little bit of oil when you work with it. This makes it easy for beginners. One thing which has to be borne in mind is that betel nuts are hollow inside. So going too deep is not advisable. Also, the wood is brittle, (though itis soft). This makes it challenging to work with. Because of the natural shape of betel nuts, a rotundness which I consider very advantageous for finishing. This supari is among the best carvings I have. Rather than say best, I'll say that it is my favorite one. Very few things in the world are more dear to me than this! (Somehow the scanned pictures do not do justice to the real thing!!)

Wild wood This was form a piece ofwood which I found lying on the road when I had taken my dog for a walk.I dont know what wood it was, but it looked like extremely hard wood, witha fine long grain. It was an unusually long grain. So much so that thewood could almost have fibres drawn out of it. But because it was hardand fine, it could be worked with.  The shape of the branch Ifound was almost perfectly circular, I could start working on it withoutmuch of pre-shaping.This was among the largest pieces I had made till then.Working on a piece as large as this made me realize that patience was thekey! Earlier on with smaller pieces, I could get the depth in a matterof minutes and it rate limiting step was only my skill. But here, not onlywas there skill involved, to demonstrate my skill I had to dig down deeperand harder.  The whole job took me abouta week to complete, with finishing. For the red color, I took it to a localcarpenter and had it dipped in rosewood polish. But the quality of thewood was poor and the polish did not stay as expected. Only the dye inthe polish remained along with the sheen.   Balsa wood Balsa wood though cheap, light, soft...it the worst wood to work with! Believe me, there is nothing more frustrating than balsa wood. It has a *horrible* grain, cross-grain cutting is impossible even with a razor sharp chisel, and finishing iseven worse. This was my first attempt at human figures. Understanding the contours of the face is so difficult! I used observe my room-mate's features, but I had to stop doing that because he started doubting my noble intentions!     Work in progress... since a long time... Presently I'm trying to work on an idol of Lord Krishna. In Hindu mythology, he is depicted as a cowherd who played his flute while tending to cows. For that I took a LOT of guidance from my guru, Mr. Vasant Kulkarni. He gave me a piece of sandal wood to work on. Here is a scanned image of the current status. It is going to be my toughest project as yet as getting the proportions of the human body is proving to be tricky. The idol is about 1.5 inches in height. The difficult part here is not only the depth of the features, but also the shape. The facial details are what I'm apprehensive about. I haven't as yet worked on a something like that on such a small scale.