Smt. Shanta Bai

Arts & Crafts Teacher

by

Dr Dwarkanath K. Murthy

Probably very few of us recollect Smt. Shanta Bai, our Middle School arts and crafts teacher who established a unique art-oriented culture in the school. Her classes were very enjoyable as they did not involve the use of books or even pencils/pens, and avoided the monotony of her teaching as well as the requirement of our attention. By nature Mrs. Shanta Bai was a motherly figure, very soft and compassionate, with a typical Kannadiga/ Maharashtrian attire. 

It was in class VII that I prepared an Agarbatti stand using wire ,andvelveteen threads, all under the able guidance of Smt Shanta Bai. The stand was well secured, and for a few years became an annual exhibit during the Dassera doll festival at home. 

Definitely my learning from this rudimentary artwork helped in its own way much later. While standardising the air drying technique for preparation of chromosomes in 1973, which took over 3 months, first to standardise in our country, even before BARC, I had always argued that preparation of the crystal clear chromosomal pictures on a slide was more of an art, and its study from a genetic standpoint is science. 

Let me now pay due respects to our teacher. I spend some time on iPhone, photographing, creating pictures and editing them to develop anunique presentation for self-satisfaction. Here is a collage of pictures shot, cropped and edited on iPhone