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Lonavla wax museum honours Anna Hazare
Anna Hazare has now joined the league of Chhatrapati Shivaji, Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Mother Teresa, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Charlie Chaplin, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi and Michael Jackson.
You do not have to go all the way to his native village of Ralegan-Siddhi in Ahmednagar district to meet Hazare, but you can not only get to meet him but pose for photographs with him in the salubrious climes of Lonavla, where you find him rubbing shoulders with the national and international leaders and celebrities -of course not in person but in wax.
Hazare’s is the latest wax statue that has made its way into the Celebrity Wax Museum in the hill station of Lonavla, 96 km from here. The life-size statue of Hazare in a sitting posture -- sculpted by Sunil Kandalloor -- was unveiled for the public at the museum on Sunday, a day after the Gandhian not only approved the statue, but also appreciated Kandalloor’s art work.
“I had taken the statue to Ralegan-Siddhi yesterday. Annaji was more than pleased with my work. To satiate curiosity, he touched his wax statue a few times,” 38-year-old Kandalloor told “The Pioneer” over phone from his Lonavla museum on Sunday evening.
What made Khandalloor sculpt Hazare’s wax statue? “He is a national figure now. He is doing a great service to the nation by leading a movement against corruption. I was very keen to have his statue as one of the exhibits in Lonavla museum that currently has 32 wax celebrity statues,” Kandalloor said. Kandalloor is the managing director of the Celebrity Wax Museum at Lonavla.
Kandalloor approached Hazare in the second week of October with a proposal to make a wax statue of the latter. “He readily agreed. He gave me an hour to take his measurements and photographs. He also gave me his dhoti, jhuba and his Gandhi cap to dress the statue to be sculpted by me,” Kandalloor said.
Kandalloor took 25 days to sculpt Hazare’s wax statue - in a sitting pose. “I used 25 kg of wax to sculpt Anna’s statue. It cost me Rs 2 lakh to create the statue,” Kandalloor said.
Apart from the statues of Shivaji, Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Mother Teresa, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Charlie Chaplin, Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi and Michael Jackson, the wax statues that Khandalloor’s museum houses include that of Shirdi Saibaba, Satya Saibaba of Puttaparthi, AR Rahman, Dr Balaji Tambe, Karnatic singer MS Subalakshmi, Mata Amritanandamayi and Oscar Award-winning film technician Resul Pookutty.
Kandalloor, who runs another wax museum in Kanyakumari, has readied the statue of legendary cricketer Kapil Dev. “It will be unveiled by Kapil Dev himself at the Hotel Taj Mahal in Mumbai next week,” he said.
Kandalloor plans to sculpt the statues of Bollywood actors Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, in the near future. “I want to have the wax statues of as many celebrities as possible in my Lonavla museum,” he said.
