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He’s only in Class VII, but he’s emerged winner of an international craft competition. Meet CSK Siddharth
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BRIMMING WITH IDEAS CSK Siddharth
“CSK was a wise boy
Who wanted to make a toy
So he entered the craft competition
And beat all the nations!”
That limerick was written for CSK Siddharth, a class VII student of Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram, by his friends. You see, he’d recently won the International Creative Craft Competition 2007 organised by Pidilite Industries Ltd., and they w
ere understandably proud of him.
After all, the contest, which started off as a national event back in 2005, covered 10,000 schools from India and abroad this year, with over 20 lakh students participating in the school, city, zonal and mega finals in all.
Siddarth, however, had no idea what he was getting into when he went for the inter-school contest back in August. “I was forced to join by the school,” he admits with endearing honesty. “We all had to compulsorily participate.”
That all changed when Siddharth won first prize for his piggy-bank shaped like a house. For the State level finals, he was inspired by balloons to build a model of an eco-friendly car that runs on solar energy with an air-compressor (it was named Sid 95 after its creator). That little car, built using his Mechano set, cardboard and papier mache, took him all the way to the mega finale in Mumbai.
There, for the first time, Siddharth had to build his creation on the spot with materials given to him within three hours.
“For the first two, we were able to give him hands on help,” says his mother Durga. “But for the final he had to do everything himself.”
To make things harder, the topic they were given the previous night —‘Village’—was modified to a ‘Futuristic Village’ just as the final began. Luckily, Siddharth and his father, inspired by ‘Swades’, had discussed making the village self-sustaining with a hydropower station and a bio-gas plant the previous night, so that’s what Siddarth did.
It wasn’t easy though. “It was so difficult to make the huts!” says Siddarth. “I had to omit many other things I’d planned to make because they took me so long.”
But it was all worth it when Siddharth was crowned the International Craft Champion 2007, and won a whopping big check of Rs. 50,000 at the end of the night. There was also something in it for his school — his craft teacher Sudha Dharman won Rs. 10,000 and the school got a digital camera.
The only this is that now, the craft king finds himself automatically signed up for all craft contests in school. “They don’t even ask me any more,” says Siddharth with a rueful grin. Oh well, that’s the price of fame!
DIVYA KUMAR
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