2th November 2018
The project for creation of a memorial for police personnel killed in the line of duty, hanging fire for more than a decade was finally completed and unveiled by the Prime Minister on October 12, the National Police Commemoration Day. Dedicated to the nation, the National Police Memorial has been erected on 6.12 acres of land at the northern end of Shantipath. With nicely laid out green spaces, a sombre central stone epitaph, an underground museum and a poignant wall of remembrance in latticed sandstone, the memorial is a profound aesthetic and political statement. What is also attracting immense attention is a 30 feet tall, abstract modern sculpture, made of a single piece of granite rock.
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking, wrote Nietzsche. Adwaita Gadanayak’s visionary concept of what needed to take shape at the memorial seems certainly the result of pensive walks at the National Gallery of Modern Art, an institution that he heads. His ‘eureka moment’ came about a year ago, soon after he was directed by the Ministry of Culture to begin work on a sculpture symbolising the ennobling ideal of the supreme sacrifice. “Sculpting requires abstract and spatial thinking”, remarks Gadanayak. “I knew our sculpture had to take the form of a compelling and spiritually charged incantation capable of measuring itself against the tranquil, meditative setting of the memorial”…