THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Lilliputians wouldn’t think twice about declaring Ganesh Subramaniam jeweller laureate and a prized national treasure. The 36-year-old jeweller, who passionately crafts nano gold artifacts, has now come up with a tiny gold number lock that actually works!
It’s almost invisible that Ganesh keeps it locked on the eye of a needle. You have to view it through a magnifying lens to appreciate the microscopic craftsmanship. Even the numbers from triple zero to triple nine are hand-crafted, he explains.
‘’It took me nine months. For all purposes, it’s a real lock, save for the fact it’s so small,’’ says Ganesh, who runs the Kamala Jewellery, named after his mother, at Poojappura. Made from 40 milligrams of gold, the lock stands three millimetres high and has a circumference of one millimetre.
There are three number rings, two base rings, a spine and a hook - all made of gold, of course. But why a number lock, of all things? ‘’I’ve crafted only tiny gold statuettes up to now. I wanted to make a mechanical object. We use number locks at home, and I thought, why not make one?’’ Unlike statuettes, mechanical objects require a high level of precision, he says.
‘Boat and Boatman’, in 30 mg gold, was Ganesh’s first miniature. That was six years ago. Three years ago, he crafted ‘Ananthasayanam’ in 20 mg gold and presented it to Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma. A 17- mg gold Nataraja idol presented to actor Mohanlal and a 35-mg cannon gifted to former President A P J Abdul Kalam are some of his other miniatures. His tiniest work to date is a 3-mg Christ. He dropped the Christ once, and it took two hours of careful combing of the floor before he could spot it. Ganesh says his odd pastime has not affected his eyesight. After all these years of squinting at microscopic objects, he still doesn’t wear specs.
Now he has also taken up painting on rice grains. His first works in this direction include water colours of Mohanlal in Army uniform alongside the tricolour and another one of Mecca on a single grain of rice. Ganesh hopes to get his number lock into the Guinness and Limca books soon.