New Testament in wood!

Kanker, Chhattisgarh, July 30 (UNI) A local carver is busy creating a copy of the New Testament using wood.

Ajay Mandavi is burning midnight oil in an endeavour to finish carving out letters from teak, using fevicol to fix them on 580 plywood pages and exhibiting them in a church by Christmas in an attempt to figure in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Mandavi carved a niche in the Limca Book of World Records after he created a wooden image of 'Art of Living' pioneer Ravishankar.

''I yearned to carve a holy book but Devnagari or any other Indian language's script is rather difficult to chisel, hence I decided on English,'' he explained.

The 20-mm wide, 5-mm high and 4-mm thick letters are being carved out of 3 x 2 sq ft teak blocks. One-and-a-half pages of the Bible take up one wooden block.

''There were about 50 people assisting me when I began but only 16 are with me,'' the carver said while claiming that he had finished 170 pages. Mandavi is receiving assistance under the Rashtriya Samvikas Yojana.

UNI