India I-Day: UAE-based teacher uses 5,000 recycled buttons to make Gandhi portrait

Sharjah - Buttons were contributed by her students of Sharjah Indian School (boys) - Juwaiza.

Using around 5,000 recycled buttons, a Sharjah-based art teacher has made a massive 40cm by 30cm portrait of Indian freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi to mark India's Independence Day. 
Rashida Adil, a UAE resident for 29 years now, had been tirelessly working on her "masterpiece" for the last three months as she wanted to dedicate it to her home country on August 15.
The teacher, who champions recycling and creates meaningful art pieces, said the lockdown period served as a boon as she got time to focus on her "patriotic" artwork.
"Since this was a tribute to my home country India, I put my heart and soul into the artwork ..in a way emulating our freedom fighters, such as Mahatma Gandhi, who had toiled relentlessly during our freedom struggle. The difference is that I did it creatively and spent almost four hours every day on it for the last three months, patiently sticking the recycled orange, green, white and black buttons on the portrait and gave it a patriotic flavour with the Tricolour (flag) background."
Rashida added that the thousands of buttons that she used in the portrait were contributed by her students of Sharjah Indian School (boys) - Juwaiza. 
Dressed in the colours of Indian national flag, Rashida, along with a co-teacher and Sharjah Indian Association president EP Johnson, visited the Consul General of India (CGI) in Dubai, Aman Puri and gifted him the framed portrait, which he greatly appreciated. 
"Although, I made the artwork single-handedly, I gifted it to the CGI on behalf of my students and school as it is with their efforts that I could collect buttons of different colours which they got from discarded uniforms or clothes at home," Rashida pointed out.
Rashida added that a handmade gift has a lot of sentimental value compared to a gift that is bought from the shop. She said: "Apart from a sense of love and patriotism we feel for India, the idea behind this innovative art creation was to give my students a message that they should not waste resources they have and reduce, reuse, recycle and recreate."
Talking about the challenging part while making the portrait, Rashida said she had to open the framed artwork seven times to fix the buttons as many of them kept falling off repeatedly because of the heat.
saman@khaleejtimes.com

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