The Breaking Man

Setting records has been a hobby all my life. I set my first record almost two decades ago, Babu says,facing rows of framed certificates displayed on bespoke racks in the basement of his Bangalore home. Since then,I have set target after target after target and worked to realise them. He is on a month-long break,a short pit stop before he shifts his focus to the next feat,which he says could be the longest throw ball rally ever played or the fastest 100m one-leg hopping ever attempted.

It is impossible to force this churning array of feats,dazzling in their variety and possibility,into a pigeonhole. At any given time,there are five to six ideas running parallel in my mind. They could be direct or indirect suggestions by friends or ideas drawn from memories of growing up in a poor family, he says. Once an idea is seared into his mind,he looks up the record books to identify a target and rehearses,usually for over three months,towards its fruition.

A fitting example is his 2001 record for the fastest Sanskrit recitation,obtained by speed-chanting the 234-worded,36-lined Venkateshwara Stotra in under 40 seconds,in just two breaths. Ask him for a sample and he launches into a five-second machine-gun delivery that sounds like a loud hum. Should someone doubt the veracity of his record,it was supervised by three Sanskrit pundits for linguistic authenticity and pronunciation,and the recording analysed in waveform by professional software to count the number of breaths. I am an atheist now,but as a child growing up in a Brahmin household,evening prayers were compulsory. Hungry,I would hurry through the chants before pouncing on dinner. That is what prompted me,decades later,to try reciting as fast as I could, Babu says.

In another instance,cycling 25 km to school every day came in handy when,as an adult,he pedalled 2,700 km through Karnataka in less than a month in an effort to set a national record a feat that,he says,was considered too special a category for inclusion in the Limca Book of Records.

His abundance of records some inventive and formidable,others strained is tempered by a past rooted in academics. A metallurgist by training,Babu got a PhD in mathematical modelling at the Indian Institute of Science,Bangalore,before travelling abroad on visiting professorships to China,Japan and Canada. He returned in 1989 to take up administrative posts at the Thapar Corporate Research and Development Centre in Patiala and the National Metallurgical Laboratory in Jamshedpur before crossing into the iron and steel industry,and later,into the diffuse ambit of motivational education. All through this,records have only been a hobby,Babu insists. They have,however,shaped much of his life,drawing from his scientific rigour he holds four patents,among them one for a rapid solidification technique to produce seamless metal tubes and reaching beyond it to culminate in a centre for excellence where he teaches short,motivational,self-designed modules. I have motivated over a lakh of people across the country in less than 10 years, Babu says.

Be it vanity disguised as meticulousness or vice versa,Babu keeps an impeccable account of his records,preserving everything from the old-fashioned scooter he used in 1998 to set a record by riding 855 km solo in 18 hours and 33 minutes,to painstakingly-detailed,indexed logbooks from each record. In his living room,record paraphernalia a basketball retired after setting a 100m dribble-running record,a knife used to cut a cucumber into over one lakh pieces,a lucky tennis racquet find pride of place in glass shelves. His wife and two daughters dont approve of his serial record-setting. It costs a minimum of Rs 25,000 to set a record this goes up to several lakhs for some records. Sadly,sponsors are few and far between and record-setting causes a considerable dent in our savings, he says.

Money isnt the only issue. Babu would chop up cucumbers every day for several months before he could achieve the number of cuts he desired. I had to invent dishes using cucumber. Everyone at home was sick of the vegetable, he says. So,when he started practising to make the most number of puris in an hour he managed to make 132,starting with preparing the dough to kneading,rolling and frying the puris one by one he decided he would treat the labourers in his neighbourhood to a free lunch every day. I spend a lot of energy trying to get funding and to get the best people sportspersons,scholars,computer programmers in the field to supervise and judge each of my records, Babu says.

Some of his sporting activities are risky,given his age. Skipping,for instance,makes his heart rate cross the safety threshold of 160 per minute. And despite a serious shoulder injury caused in an accident,he continues to play sports like basketball that put a strain on the upper body. I know my body well. I know what and how much it can take. Since most of my records are inaugural (meaning there have been no previous attempts to set these records),it is important that I set benchmarks that are close to human limits, Babu says. For instance,in a carrom record that is next to impossible to best,Babu pocketed 19 pawns in less than 40 seconds,which works out to two seconds for each pawn. Another feat of his,scientific lecturing non-stop for 26 hours,broke a previous world record to set one that can never be broken,as rules were amended soon after to make the marathon safer for lecturers who would attempt the feat in the years to come.

This rush of fame,so far removed from the frailties and defeats of humanity,is the overarching narrative in Babus life. It punctuates his self-help lectures and splices passion with obsession. The records,however,speak for themselves.