Tribute To A Knife!

My Knife

This is a flower I carved out of a beetroot. It is very kind of you if you found this to resemble a Rose! On this particular Friday, I bought the largest beetroot I could find to carve a rose with fully opened petals. Gracing the picture is my favourite carving knife I bought out of curiosity! They say when you buy a pet, it is often the pet choosing you, rather than the logical way things are ‘supposed’ to work out! In this case I simply had no idea what I can do with it. The peculiar shape appealed to me and I just had to buy this strange knife!

My wife knew that Hotel School (now Faculty of Hospitality) students used such knives to carve pumpkins and papayas. Never having tried such exotic a craft, I sheepishly hid the knife somewhere. Months passed and the knife was forgotten till one day I saw on YouTube, a short video of a Papaya being carved into a beautiful flower or multiple flowers! My heart raced, and searched for the red handled knife that I was so rude to!

The very organized lady to whom I am married to, just opened a drawer in the kitchen and fished out the knife for me, and a passion for vegetable and fruit carving and later soap carving was kindled in me and that is how I was sucked into the charming world of carving!!

A person who was never praised for artistic abilities cannot go from zero to an acceptable level of carving without making awkward and perishable mistakes, destroying many attempted projects at infancy. But there is a silver lining here; in fruit carving, when you carve melons and papaya or mangoes the advantage is, one can always eat the failed attempts!