For the Record

Says Azad, ‘‘The angel asked me to wake up and break records, which is how I started out. I’ve been featured in newspapers since 1971, the Limca Book came much later.’’ And even when he poofs into the Great Beyond, our man will have put in place the apparatus for the setting of another record. ‘‘My father donated his eyes and then I, my son and his son have also filled up forms for eye donation,’’ says Azad.

Each year, gentlemen like Azad and more of their like congregate on the pages of India’s only record book—the Limca Book of Records. Like Pune’s Shridhar Chillal, 67, who grew the world’s longest nails (his thumbnail measures 52 inches) as revenge against his ‘‘teacher who rapped him for not cutting his nails’’.

Or Milind Deshmukh, an operator at Bajaj Auto and a member of the city’s anti-superstition society, who walked for 104.2 km balancing a milk bottle on his head in all of 21 hours, in order to ‘‘send across the message that even ordinary people can accomplish feats normally associated with supernatural powers.’’

What began as an exercise in brand building is now well-entrenched tradition. A decade and a half on—the LBR celebrates its 15th year next month—the aspirants to oddball fame have only increased. ‘‘Every day, we get up to 15 calls,’’ says Vijaya Ghose, editor, LBR.

The why-they-do-it is easily anwerable—it’s mostly recognition, which spreads across the hometown, country and often, even abroad. ‘‘I think the acknowledgement and the occasional monetary gain mean a lot to them,’’ says Ghose. Surely, there are other less oddball and cumbersome passages to boldface fame in today’s times?

Yes, but, according to Ghose, the relentless driver is to do something ‘‘no one else can’’. Which could be anything faster, slower, higher, longer and shorter than any other person around. Which is how in Rajnathnagar, Chhattisgarh, four lines of text in the Book have made celebrities out of a stationery shop couple. For 18 years now, Besant and Anita Jain have been dressing up in identical clothes. Anita buys two saris every time she goes shopping, the second one becoming a shirt for her husband.

Says the 42-year-old Besant, sitting along with Anita, in identical clothes, naturally, ‘‘One day, five years after our marriage, we went to the bank wearing matching clothes and were inundated with compliments. So, we decided to continue with it.’’

Even though it’s an expensive proposition for this father of five—buying two saris, getting a shirt stitched and pictures taken for future verification—there’s no way, he says, they would abandon the practice. ‘‘People get their pictures taken with us. Even our estranged family members who weren’t agreeable to our marriage have made up with us. It’s become our identity now,’’ says Besant.

If Azad and the Jains appear to be Weirdsville denizens, Mumbai’s Chandulall Chowdhary and Chennai-based P Mohan Rao have featured in the LBR for relatively mundane reasons.

Rao, a retired MRF employee, didn’t know he was setting a record when he arranged a get-together of his Palagummi family in Hyderabad in 1999. It was a 302-member family that gathered, five generations of grandpas, grandmas, uncles, aunts, newly-weds and tots. The gathering, which took a year to organise, was done without e-mails. ‘‘Just old-fashioned letters. And one thing I can tell you—about 250 people did not know me,’’ says Rao.

Like Rao, feats and achievements weren’t locked on to Chowdhary’s viewfinder when he started keeping a diary as a 15-year-old in Kolkata in 1965. Forty years, 11,730 pages and over nine lakh words on, he’s the man other diarists have to beat.

‘‘My father used to keep diaries and I decided to emulate him. There’s nothing personal in them, just a daily account of my activities,” says the export consultant, sitting alongside a mostly dusty pile of diaries that smell of memories.

‘‘I don’t usually leaf through them, but sometimes it’s fun to find out what I was up to on, say, January 4, 1975,’’ says Chowdhary, who contacted the LBR only around 2002, after trying unsuccessfully to be in the Guinness Book the previous year.

‘‘I was not desperate to get into the record books, but just gave it a try,’’ he says. Chowdhary could well remain India’s most consistent diarist. As for the Guinness, it’s a tough task—the world record for the longest-running diary is in the name of a South African—that’s 93 years.

Mohali’s Devinder Pal Singh Sehgal, 43, though, has a better chance. Sehgal, a scientific officer with the Punjab government’s forensic laboratory, wants to make the world’s smallest kite. Already an LBR man for having passed eight kites through the eye of a needle, Sehgal, who sits down daily with an eyepiece, a pair of scissors, a surgical blade and some bamboo, now wants to compress his current best—a 1.65 mm x 1.55 mm kite.

‘‘My passion for kites was born after I won a prize during Basant Utsav in Panjab University in the early ’80s,’’ says Sehgal, as he shows you the blue, yellow and orange specks pasted carefully on slides. For a man who wanted ‘‘Punjab to flourish through kites’’—his earlier, bigger kites came with social messages—Sehgal now wants to go international and is looking for a sponsor for international kite festivals.

Meanwhile, not too far from Mohali, in Pitampura, Delhi, in a beauty parlour called Jacko is another man who seeks worldwide acclaim.

Mohd Rafi, 25, can provide you with the coif of your choice in anything from two to 10 minutes.

Just last year, this hairdresser blitzed through tonnes of keratin, cutting and styling for 1,507 people in 144 hours, a slash-style fest that lasted a week. ‘‘A Paris hairstylist holds the world record—3,000 haircuts in 400 hours—and I want to surpass it,’’ says Rafi, who practises on loyal clients. He’s now readying for an assault on Paris and Guinness. ‘‘It should happen anytime between April and December. Global fame is my greatest motivator.’’

If these record-breakers appear like oddities to the world at large, Ghose, who has learnt to treat each feeler with respect, has a different spin on it. ‘‘I ask myself, ‘Could I do that?’’’ she says. ‘‘Then it’s easy.’’

Jatinder Kaur Tur/Amritsar; Savitha V/Chennai;
Sumana Mukherjee, Shailaja Tripathi/Delhi; Murali K Menon/Mumbai;
Neeraja Ganesh/Chandigarh; Sunanda Mehta/Pune