The 51-inch standing idol of Lord Ram will be installed at Ayodhya temple on January 5.
The four-foot idol of Ram Lalla in Ayodhya has been chosen, and while there is no official statement from the temple trust about which sculptor's work will be installed, Union minister Pralhad Joshi has let the cat out of the bag. The sculptor in question, he said, is Arun Yogiraj, whose mega projects tower over vast swathes of the country -- the 12-foot statue of Adi Shankaracharya in Uttarakhand's Kedarnath, the 21-feet Hanuman statue in Mysore and the 30-foot statue of Subhas Chandra Bose that stands under the canopy behind Amar Jawan Jyoti at Delhi's India Gate.
Mr Yogiraj's wife Vijetha Yogiraj said when her husband is in the mood, he can work for 48 hours at a stretch. Asked about the Ram idol, she said he had started with a small prayer.
"'Lord, let your face be revealed through my hands, my work,' he had prayed," his wife told NDTV in an exclusive interview.
Her husband had worked on the statue for around six months, going through around 2,000 photos of children before making his final drawing. In all this, he had followed the criterion of the temple trust, Vijetha Yogiraj said.
The order for the 51-inch standing idol of Lord Ram -- which will be installed at the sanctum sanctorum of the new temple on January 5 -- was a tall one.
The statue will have to show Lord Ram at the age of five years, and should radiate his divinity, the temple trust had said.
"The one with the most divine look and bearing a distinct impression of Ram Lalla would be selected for Pran Pratishtha," said Champat Rai, the secretary of the temple trust.
Three sculptors were in the running. Besides Mr Yogiraj, who comes from a long line of distinguished sculptors from Mysuru, there is the award-wining sculptor from Bengaluru, Ganesh Bhatt, and Satyanarayan Pande from Rajasthan.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is said to be well-acquainted with the work of the 38-year-old Yogiraj. The selection of the statue, Champat Rai said, was made on December 31, when he was in Ayodhya to inaugurate the new international airport.