Patience

Once upon a time, a villager was passing through a forest. He found a huge stone on the way. He took that stone and carefully kept aside. The next day he started carving stone into a sculpture. By the first beat of the hammer, it broke into two pieces. He picked up the biggest piece of stone and carved into a big statue of Lord Venkateswara. He kept that under a big tree and left the place. The next day a group of villagers who were passing by, found this statue of god under the tree. They were surprised and thought that the god himself came to their village to bless them. So, they started worshiping that statue of the god. Hundreds of devotees of Lord Venkateswara flocked to this shrine. Slowly it became a famous pilgrim center. Some of the devotees decided to construct a temple to this statue of the god. Within a short period of time, a big temple was constructed. People started offering garlands, sweets, fruits, etc. The other broken piece of the stone was kept in front of the god’s image. The devotees whoever used to come to the temple used to break the coconuts on this broken stone. It made the broken stone to feel jealous of the god’s statue. One day broken stone asked the god’s statue that though we both were made of the same stone, you were respected a lot by the devotees. They offer Chandan to you and put garlands of different flowers. But they were breaking coconuts on my head. Why were you worshiped by the devotees and I was hit by coconuts? What was the secret behind this? Then the stone statue of god told that by the first beat of the hammer you were separated from me and you were not able to bear the pain. But I went through the whole process of carving the statue. The sculptor used a hammer and point chisel for removing large, unwanted chunks of stone. He used claw chisel which has multiple gouging surfaces to add texture to the figure. Then he used rasps and rifflers to amplify the shape of the finished work. After that, I was polished with sandpaper. I had faith in the sculptor and patience to undergo the process. I enjoyed the entire process though it was very painful and emerged as god’s idol.