The Fire Monger

“I had broken the record of Hubertus from Germany in February. I had used only one stick of fire to blow 48 fire flames from my mouth. Now,I wanted to raise the mark,” says Mehra aka Jassi,happy that his current record of blowing 76 flames consecutively from his mouth is a little harder for anybody to break.

Of course,the second record had him literally fighting fire with fire. Mehra recalls his several narrow escapes as fire initially got the better of him. “But my efforts have reaped results. Besides winning the trophy for the second time,I also got to share space with Salman Khan,” he says.

Mehra is now eyeing two more records — fire eating and fire walking. “For the fire walk,I will have to walk on 32 ft of fire and have started practising,” he says.

His awe-inspiring and bizarre acts are motivated as much by a need to challenge himself as for paying tribute to his brother,who died last year. “These are for him and for my father. I want my father to be proud of me,” he says.

When he is not breaking records,Mehra makes a living by doing fire shows in city. He had learnt fire games as a teenager from his godfather Guru Surinder Chowdhary. “I left my studies after Class VI and took it up as a profession,” he says.

Mehra also attributes his success to Chandigarh. “While,the record is for India,it’s the love that I got from the city that kept me going,” he says,as he retreats into his Sector 45 residence to practise his fire games to fulfill the burning desire of bagging the other two records.