What do you do if you’ve grown up giving your family cows a makeover on Mattu Pongal, but you suddenly get married and move to Chennai? You stop and pick up a colourfully decked up mud cow off the Kodambakkam pavement instead. “

I can’t travel this year because I’m carrying. But Pongal isn’t the same without bathing our four cows and watching my brothers paint the horns. But I can’t ask them to bring a cow from Dindigul here for my sake, so I persuaded my husband to get this (points to the doll) instead,” laughs a cheerful 22-year-old Subhashini.

She is not alone. In fact, according to Krishna Wodeyar who came up with the idea of making these cows as colourful as the pots, he has been getting plenty of enquiries from customers all through Monday, despite having sold-out his stock by 11.30 am.

“My son wanted to concentrate on pots but I usually like making cow dolls. This time we made lots of them and used various colour paints and glass work on them. They sold immediately,” he says with plenty of glee.

The mud-figurines were first put out on Saturday and have quickly been sold-out over the weekend – they came in two sizes with the smaller one being sold at `200 and the larger one fetching about `450.

“In the villages, it is not just about getting the cows clean but reinstilling belief that gomatha is godly. Plenty of people who bought it asked if this was made for keeping in the puja room, so I said yes! It was made with a lot of care so it deserves the attention, just like a real cow,” he adds.

To keep the effect real, Krishna had also perched the cows on an old push-cart and lined the surface with hay to create ‘a shed effect’.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Express News Service – Chennai / January 14th, 2014