House of wax

This isn't anything like Andre de Toth's 1953 chilling classic by that name. It's a museum in Lonavala that is bound to give London's famed Madame Tussaud a run for its money

The quiet town of Lonavala, one of Mumbai's favourite weekend getaways, is waking up to a new tourist attraction. Four kilometres from the railway station, on the highway that leads to Pune, a museum that can give Madame Tussauds a run for its money has come up. With great emphasis on precision and sartorial detail, the Wax Museum, as it is simply called, is a place where a tourist can spend hours with life-size wax replicas of personalities like Kapil Dev, AR Rahman, Anna Hazare, Angelina Jolie, Saddam Hussein, Mahatma Gandhi and Michael Jackson.

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Set up in 2010, and spread across 4,000 sq feet, the museum is the brainchild of 39-year-old Sunil Kandalloor, a diploma-holder in fine arts from Kerala's Alappuzha district. His museum houses 40 statues of leading Indian and international personalities from the fields of politics, entertainment, sports, history and spirituality. Tickets are reasonably priced at Rs 100 a head, and you can take in your cameras and video cameras for free.

It all started when Kandalloor, who was working in an advertising agency, got fascinated with wax modelling and decided to try his hand at it. His first, a bust-size likeness of Krishna found it way to the museum run by the Guruvayoor Temple in Kerala. That initial spark was enough to set the ball rolling and Kandalloor set up two museums in Kanyakumari and Thekkady that housed statues of local celebrities. Itching to try bigger markets, he closed the two museums and set up the one in Lonavala - strategically located about 90 km from Mumbai and 60 km from Pune.

"The level of awareness was low when we started out in Lonavala," says Kandalloor who decided to embark on an unusual marketing campaign. He got advertisements and the establishment's logo painted on a small car and had it driven around the town, distributing pamphlets and inviting tourists to take a look at what the museum had on offer. His efforts paid. The museum currently gets 500 to 700 visitors on weekdays and about 2,000 on weekends.

Kandalloor relies on video footage and photographs when the subject is dead or is otherwise not available for sittings. But he does have a good eye for detail and has created accurate likenesses of Mahatma Gandhi, Saddam Hussein, Benazir Bhutto and Rabindranath Tagore, among others. There are times he does get access to the subject - as he did in the case of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi whom he met in November 2013. "I had been trying to meet him in the last four years. Several dignitaries and politicians promised to facilitate a meeting with him, but nothing happened. Then I wrote to him directly, and within two days I got a response," he says.

In such cases, he spends time taking measurements, and noting minute details such as crow's feet, wrinkles, dimples and freckles, and facial expressions like pouts and frowns. All of this is backed up by a set of photographs taken while profiling the subject. To make the statues as lifelike as possible, Kandalloor uses human hair which he collects from a temple in Tamil Nadu. "There is this 'grandma' I know, who is always ready to give me some of her long tresses in case the subject has grey hair," he smiles.

When he meets his subjects, he tries to get a set of clothes, and in Modi's case, even got his spectacles and watch. Kandalloor then fashions the subject in clay, and once satisfied with the contours of the prototype model, he gets up to six separate metal moulds made for different parts of the body. Liquid paraffin wax, along with colour, is poured into these moulds and once it sets, the work of art is ready. "Each statue takes about Rs 2 lakh to make and takes about a month to be ready for display. This is in the case of subjects whose measurements and other details are available. It takes up to three months for foreign celebrities and the deceased," he says.

Kandalloor has got big ideas. He knows he has to 'go global' in order to reach a wider audience. He already has statues of Michael Jackson, Saddam Hussein, Nelson Mandela and Angelina Jolie at Lonavala, and is now working on Lionel Messi as well. The Indian celebrities that he's currently setting in wax include Amitabh Bachchan, Rajnikanth, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Manmohan Singh, Bal Thackeray and Yashwantrao Chavan. Kandalloor is also looking at various options in south Mumbai, where he wants to set up a 10,000 square foot museum that will have separate halls for politics, sports, entertainment, and other categories.