School children attempt a record feat

Paint 1,186 National Flags on sand structures on beach in Nellore district

Schoolchildren painting national flags on sand structures created on Mypadu beach on Tuesday.

This Independence Day, the Mypadu beach in Nellore district witnessed a rare buzz. About 200 school children drawn from two schools at Kodur and Muthukur in Nellore district descended on the beach to celebrate the occasion in an innovative way.

The schools are run by the Andhra Pradesh Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions’ Society (APSWREIS).

Led by their teachers, the children marched to the sandy beach with an excitement of doing something that could earn them a place in the Limca Book of Records. In the next 2 hours 40 minutes, they painted 1,186 Indian Flags on elevated sand blocks raised using plastic buckets.

The sand blocks spread over 200 metres on the beach with the National Tricolour painted on them made an interesting spectacle.

Bringing their creative side up, the students, under the watchful eyes of young sand artist Manchala Sanath Kumar, started the sand play and in a short while, there stood colourful rows of sand pillars bearing the flag.

‘Rangoli’ colours

After making mounds of sand, they added water to make it wet. They then overturned the buckets with their base removed to get the shape of a round elevated base. Using ‘rangoli’ colours of white, green and orange, the hues of the Tricolour, they coloured one side of the sand block, moving gently from bottom towards the top. The attempt is to break the record of renowned sand artist Sudarshan Patnaik who created 1,000 images of Santa Clause in sand in three days.

“The children did a remarkable job. A mere 15-minute demo in their school was what they knew about the art. Since the kids were spread over a long stretch and there was no mike to instruct everybody at once, I was worried about a possible botch-up. But they observed the work of their closest friends and followed it,” said Mr. Sanath Kumar.