POSTER PREACHER: Balu's target audience comprises mostly schoolchildren

Try and picture this. The frame is around 19 inches by 16 inches. At its centre is a large bomb that blooms like the petals of a pink lotus. A delicate dove furtively peeps through the ugly core, reaching out to the sky-blue surroundings. Just as prominent is a heart-shaped element that is intricately woven within. Anyone would agree that these are among the unlikeliest of metaphors to depict a device as devastating as the bomb but for Venkataraman Balu, that is precisely the idea.

"Why must the bomb be used for destruction?" wonders the 74-year-old artist. "It is as much a symbol of peace as it is of war. And you can change a bomb into a bloom." And as if that paradox wasn't difficult enough to digest, he points to his striking piece of art, a collage really, and talks of how a pair of scissors could serve as a brush.

A global peace activist with a difference, the Bangalore-based Balu has been spreading his message through an array of collages for the past 20 years. Most of his collages are simple, though some have a Salvador Dali touch to them. He usually opens his lectures with a Vedic chant and then invites questions from the audience. His target group comprises mostly children because he believes that it is in their hands that the future lies. The mind, he tells you, is like clay which can be easily moulded. And the fresher the clay, the better the impression.

For Balu, the medium and the means of communication are as vital as his message. The effort is to go about it in a manner that is as unimposing as possible. Collages, he feels, are very effective in this respect. As he points out, the very medium is significant because it is created out of torn paper and other material that is generally considered waste. The concept blends perfectly with his basic premise that peace is a state of mind, it is what one makes of a given situation.

Collage communication apart, Balu also draws from a vast repository of insightful stories, anecdotes and verses to regale his young audiences. American President Abraham Lincoln, he once related, was found polishing his shoes. Unable to stop himself, a surprised youngster went up to him and said, "Mr President, you polish your own shoes?" "Yes," replied Lincoln, adding, "Whose shoes do you polish?" As the youngsters listening to Balu burst into laughter, the point that he was trying to make did not get lost either. "He makes it all so simple," says nine-year-old Lohit Murthy, who can now explain that a sense of peace comes from being disciplined, contented and hardworking.

As a former senior scientific officer at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, it isn't surprising that Balu often supports his philosophy of peace with figures. Holding forth on a smile, for instance, he will tell you in all seriousness that it takes15 muscles to make your face beam with smiles. Frowning, on the other hand, involves 47 muscles. The morale of the statistics: smile more and you will have 32 wrinkles less on your face.

While that should be enough reason for anyone to break into a smile, Balu recalls how science even matured the artist in him. Although he drew for Shankar's Weekly and contributed to the children's page of The Indian Express during his early days, it was his sketches of plants as a postgraduate student of botany which threw up a whole new world for him. Being married to Shakuntala, a fellow artist, art critic and designer, also helped. While she was a traditional painter-she passed away in 1988-he created collages. Together, they travelled to many place across the globe and exhibited their work at shows that attracted curiosity and admiration. Today, their art is a part of many private and public collections, In fact Balu's cut-and-paste masterpieces have made it to the Modern Art Gallery of Seoul as well as the covers of several magazines and journals like The Reader's Digest and The Unicef Courier. One collage, titled "Diwali Lamps", was also used by Unicef for a set of its greeting cards in 1986.

Does all this mean that the peace activist is commercial? "I have made money from some of my collages," Balu admits, "but by and large, their main purpose is to spread peace." Peace that is priceless, one that results from piecing together the hidden treasures of life.