Drawing inspiration from an 80-year-old and 25-mm-long version of the Bhagwadgeeta preserved in the city's Manekrao Memorial Museum, partners Ketan Junnarkar and Shivaji Jagdale of Jyoti designed the minikin copy for the All India Screen Printing Competition, organised by the Apex Institution Screen Printing India in 1997. Accommodated in a carved silver box fitted with lens, the exhibit was awarded a Special Prize this August.

Designed on the computer, the miniature version was a product of a laborious six-month period involving manual cutting, sorting and binding of the stamp-sized pages.

Talking to Express Newsline, Junnarkar said, ``While the layouts were easily prepared on the computer, preparing the positives and negatives, incorporating the reduced character size was a laborious task. Even after the printing, each page had to be carefully cut to the required size with a blade, following which they had to be placed in the correct order and deftly bound together''.

Jagdale, meanwhile, said that they were trying to get their achievement listed in the Limca Book of Records and the Guiness Book of World Records. ``We have sent our applications and are keenly awaiting the result,'' he added. According to Jagdale, the printing technique incorporated by the duo could also facilitate reading of the book without lens for a person with normal eyesight.

As their next venture, the duo plan to print a miniature version of the Quran. Said Junnarkar, ``To our knowledge, the largest printed volume of the Quran is housed in Vadodara. So we think it would be apt if the city also boasted of the smallest version of the same''.