Artists'Forum

There's always this one iconic location or building that people associate their college to. For us, it's our own NITK beach. Department buildings, students, shops, professors may all change over time, but the beach is our constant. Every person who has ever been part of the NITK family, feels nostalgic when they look at photos of our beach. Although the beach was a major attraction on campus, the wall beside the gates leading upto the beach was dull and dilapidated. In 2019, the members of the artists forum took it upon themselves to bring the wall back to life. Over a span of a week, the club members along with student volunteers painted the wall with beautiful seascapes inspired by the disney movie, Moana. The project was done entirely during the night, starting everyday at 7 PM till 2 AM. The last few days leading upto the inauguration, there were students who worked all night long until sunrise before they could call it a day. Despite a slim budget of 21,000 rupees, 50+ hours of work by over 30+ students made the project a crowd-puller for days to come. We as a club also feel great about the fact that we have etched our work into the sands of time of the college. In addition to all the hard work that paid off, the members of the club made unforgettable memories in the process. With occasional refreshments, our favourite pop and bollywood tracks and our closest friends around, it was indeed a delight to work on a project on such a big scale. Right from sketching out the outline using chalk on day one to the finishing touches on the last day it was a packed journey which paid off beautifully in the end. When asked about taking on such a large scale project like this without any professional guidance, the convener for Artists’ Forum 2018-2019, Vishesh Goel, describes his mixed excitement and anxiety before the start of the project. “Whenever my friend and I looked at the painting at the NITK underpass, done a few years ago by one of the older AF batches, we thought we should definitely take up a major art project, mainly to promote such a culture in our college and to leave a distinguishing mark as an art club. Before the project started in fact even on the first day of it, I remember asking my friend "will we be able to do this? " The result well, we all know. Super proud of the AF batch of 2019, that we were able to achieve this feat, and happier to see the trend going forward and reaching new milestones.” The mural was inaugurated on 12th February 2019 in the presence of our director, Dr. K Umamaheshwar Rao, Chairperson, Balaveera Reddy and our beloved Faculty advisor Dr. Senthil Tilak.