Seventy-one-year-old Rusi Bharucha’s hobby of working with small things — whittling on chalk and lead, bonsai, and making his own tools for pruning and shaping of his small creations, won him second place at the global "Art in a Capsule” competition organized by Indian multinational pharmaceutical company ACG in May this year. Competitors were required to submit their work — either a sculpture or a rolled up artwork — that could fit into a capsule. When Bharucha received a call from the organizers that his 13 mm x 5.2 mm sculptures in pencil lead of Moses, a ghodha (winged bull), Ganapati and Omar Khayyam had won a prize, he asked them whether he had won a consolation prize. "I had forgotten that I had submitted the pieces. I never expected to win, anyway,” he told Parsiana over a call on October 1, 2019. It was family friend, sculptor and scrapture artist Arzan Khambatta who insisted he participate in the competition, he said.
Clockwise from above: Rusi Bharucha at work on his miniature sculptures;
samples of his work; award winning entries: carving with precision
When working with bonsai, Bharucha would carve small pieces of aerated concrete to make them look like Japanese mountains. Wood also appeared in places, carved to fit into his bonsai creations. Fascinated by some carved pieces of chalk which he saw in Khambatta’s studio, created by the scrapture artist during breaks from handling metals, Bharucha tried his hand at chiseling. Soon chalk made way for thick pencil leads. He went on to create fictitious characters as well as carving faces and bodies of famous personalities. Among his 100+ creations, "there were Abraham Lincoln, and Einstein, and the Mother and Child, a Japanese warrior and Michael Jackson,” Bharucha noted. Being a staunch Zoroastrian, it was not long till the subjects changed to Zarathushtra, the ghodhas and the farohar. "I would be sculpting even while waiting for my chemotherapy sessions,” noted the septuagenarian who has successfully battled cancer. "He would sit hours on end, carving away… It was his creativity and his passion which helped him overcome what he was going through,” lauded Khambatta in an email to Parsiana.
A diploma holder in automotive engineering, Bharucha worked as a freelance consultant for most of his life. Besides modifying cars and bikes for races, he would take part in rallies too. In 1984, he undertook the modification of a bike for his friend at the then 150 sq ft workshop where Khambatta started his sculpting. The friend was to take part in the Bombay Grand Prix, recalled Bharucha.
As Khambatta noted, Bharucha’s work is "carved to amazing detail… His sculptures have a carved stone-like quality. His precision with the sharp blade of the knife is such that he can carve negative spaces between the sculptures that are barely 4 mm thick.”