Pune: Visitors heading to the Ganapati temple near 19-year-old Hrishikesh Kishor Kamble’s home in Sukhsagarnagar, Katraj, this Ganeshotsav are getting an unexpected glimpse of another Ganapati.Displayed inside the hall of his home, facing the front so that it can be seen from outside, is a mosaic made using 520 Rubik’s cubes.Kamble, a second-year architecture student and speedcuber, completed the mosaic on Sept 12. Each cube had to be turned to show the required colour combination, with the individual faces coming together to form a larger image when viewed from a distance.“The idea came from thinking about how a photograph could be broken down into small blocks of colour and recreated using cubes. I thought of converting an ordinary photograph into pixels and then creating the image using Rubik’s cubes. I used around 520 cubes, and it took me about four days to complete the mosaic. I worked on it for about three to four hours a day,” said Kamble.The finished work has become an incidental attraction for people visiting the nearby temple. Since it is visible from the front of the house, passers-by can see the mosaic without entering the premises, with some stopping to take a closer look. It is one of several such works Kamble has created, with his earlier mosaics featuring celebrities, sportspersons and anime characters.Kamble’s fascination with the cube began during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when he was in Std VI and started learning to solve it through YouTube videos. What began as a way to spend time during the lockdown gradually developed into competitive speedcubing. His first solves took about a minute, but after learning advanced methods online, he brought that down to around 15 seconds.The teenager now spends at least three hours a day practising. He has also trained more than 200 students online, including learners from the US, Canada, Australia and Dubai, and has participated in World Cube Association competitions. He is now preparing to attempt a Guinness World Records entry.“Whether it is art or speed solving, both draw on the same familiarity with the mechanics of the cube. The mosaic, however, calls for patience rather than speed. In speedcubing, the objective is to find and execute a sequence of moves as quickly as possible. For a mosaic, the result matters more than the time taken to get there. It is about getting every part of the picture right,” said Kamble.
