It was on the insistence of his artist and sculptor friend Arzan Khambatta that Dadar Parsi Colony resident Rusi Bharucha first began his journey with sculpting around 12 years ago. “This one time, when I was at Arzan’s studio, I noticed a few pieces of chalk lying on the table—Arzan had very deftly sculpted on them. When I enquired, he said he did it to pass his time, and asked me to give it a shot as well,” Bharucha remembers, adding, “I thought Arzan was joking... I had never done something so intricate before.”

But Bharucha’s curiosity got the better of him. The retired automobile engineer and self-taught artist went back home with a box of chalk, and kept at it, till he could sculpt to his satisfaction. “The initial creations weren’t great. But I managed to perfect it after a lot of trial and error,” he recalls, adding that sculpting was also therapeutic, as he was battling cancer at the time.