69 Vijay roles, carved in fruit and vegetables

Chennais Amirta students spent ten days carving his screen career into ash gourds, from a 1992 debut to the film that carried him into politics.

The display went up at Chennais Amirta’s aviation training centre in Royapettah, and the headcount tells the story: sixty-nine carvings, one for every screen role, tiered against a painted facade. Each is sculpted from an ash gourd or a melon by students of the institute’s hotel-management programme, who spent ten days on it before it opened to the public.

The sequence runs in order. It starts with Naalaiya Theerpu, the 1992 film that gave Vijay his first lead, and ends with Jananayagan, the send-off he shot before leaving the screen for politics. In between sit the titles a whole generation grew up quoting: Ghilli, Sivakasi, Sura, Bigil, whose plastic referee whistle pokes up out of one of the middle rows.

The carvings climb a painted facade in tiers, sixty-nine of them in all.

Actor Sanjeev, a friend of the Chief Minister, opened the exhibition alongside R. Boominathan, who chairs the Chennais Amirta group. Sanjeev walked the rows, stopped at a few of the carvings, and told the students the work read less like a stunt than like patience, the same imagination and steady hand the kitchen asks of them.

Each piece is labelled with a film, from Sura and Sivakasi to Bigil, whose whistle stands in the middle row.

Two finished portraits show the detail the students worked to over the ten days.

Boominathan used his turn for the institute’s pitch, that its hotel-management and aviation courses place students with international employers, and that showcases like this are how the school likes to put the work on view.

The carvings will not last; ash gourd and melon keep for only a few days, which is rather the point of the form. For the length of the exhibition, fifteen-odd years of a film career that ended at the Secretariat sit stacked in vegetables and fruit, label by label, before the whole thing goes back to the compost.