Though the groundbreaking ceremony got over in April last year, it was some time before the project could take off, for the engineers had to synergise the undulating terrain with the circular memorial. Then, there were three young Kusum trees that would have faced death by axe had the memorial come up in the exact place allotted to it. So the design was tweaked just a wee bit to ensure that the trees were saved. UT’s Chief Engineer V K Bhardwaj and Chief Architect Renu Saigal conducted a series of meetings to overcome the hurdles and get the project going.

IT’S a project so unique that Dalbir Singh, the cheerful assistant engineer stationed at the site, says he’s never worked on such a project in 27 years of his service.

‘‘Nor have I,’’ chips in Shams A Shaikh, the young assistant architect from Mumbai who not only fine-tuned the memorial layout but also designed its 22.5-foot-high sculpture at the centre, which is today the talking point of the team’s weekly meets on Tuesdays.

‘‘He took a while to design it but it’s worth every second that went into it,’’ enthuses Sandhu. Shaikh, a JJ School of Arts graduate, who breaks into Marathi every time he picks up his cell (It’s my wife, he grins), says the sculpture, which looks like a cross between a rose bud and Eiffel Tower (Shaikh winces when you put it like that) represents three wings of the armed forces that merge into one at the top. Fashioning it out of stone would have been problematic so Team Memorial decided to shape it out of brass.

... contd.