The first time Nikhil Shukla adjudicated a Guinness world record, two million people turned up. Standing on a makeshift dais just before dawn in January 2012, Shukla gazed with bleary, incredulous eyes; he was 28, and he had never seen such a mammoth crowd in his life. Tolls on the national highway from the nearest city, Rajkot, had been suspended to accommodate the traffic, and Shukla had to trudge 20 minutes from his VIP parking spot, squeezing through dense thickets of bodies, to approach the stage. The throng that gathered in this patch of dusty farmland in western India to watch the event came from villages and towns across the district. They had responded to a call from a Gujarati community organisation that, with a vague aim of promoting public harmony, wanted people to pair off and shake hands with one another, setting a world record for the most simultaneous handshakes.
Shukla is the sole Guinness World Records representative in India, and he has since contended with many situations like this one, in which a deep enthusiasm for record-setting threatens to swamp the precise rigour of record verification. That January morning, Shukla spotted several problems right away. Participants had each been assigned an ID card with an embedded microchip, but with such an enormous assembly, it would take more than a full day to count them all. The counted and the uncounted also had to be kept apart until they had all been reckoned and the grand shaking of hands could begin. "My role is as a judge," Shukla tells me. "I can't do crowd management." He told the organisers that they had a potential disaster on their hands: "You can't tell two million people to sit quietly." It took seven hours for Shukla to count off 48,870 people and marshall them into a holding area, where, once a signal was given, they shook hands for five minutes in mock solemnity. "People were laughing and giggling, pretending to total strangers that they were old friends meeting after years," Shukla recalls. "It was electric." The record hasn't been broken since.
In recent decades, an obsession with the Guinness World Records book in India has given rise to a fevered subculture of record-setters. There are homegrown catalogues of achievement - the India Book of Records, which is distinct from the Indian Book of Records, and the Limca Book of Records, named not for a beer but for a brand of fizzy lemonade - but the Guinness World Records book holds the most allure. Nearly a tenth of all Guinness World Records submissions now come from India. In 2013, Indians applied for roughly 3,000 records, just behind the United States and Britain, and the number of Indian record-holders has grown 250 per cent over the past five years. Many of these feats are, like the orgy of handshaking, records of mass participation. In India, it is easy to rustle up a crowd: the biggest blood drive (61,902 donors); the largest motorcycle pyramid (201 men and 10 motorcycles). Individual records display manic creativity and diligence: the cultivation of ear hair 7.12 inches long; the guitar performance on Mount Everest; the 103-character sentence typed out, in 47 seconds, with a nose; the limbo-skating under a row of 39 parked cars. Some quests have a tragic edge; Sailendra Nath Roy, trying to cross a river on a zip line attached to his ponytail, died of a heart attack after his hair was caught in the pulley. Others are tinged with a different sort of pathos. Har Parkash, a 72-year-old man from New Delhi, covered his body in 366 flag tattoos, chugged a bottle of ketchup in under 40 seconds, adopted his 61-year-old brother-in-law and set several other records and then, for good measure, changed his name to Guinness Rishi, his life and identity swallowed up by his obsession.
A stolid, no-nonsense person, even Shukla cannot help marveling at his compatriots' zeal for Guinness records. He likes to tell the story of Shridhar Chillal, a man in his mid-70s who stopped clipping the nails on his left hand in 1952 and, as a consequence, holds the record for the world's longest fingernails: a combined length of 20 feet across his five fingers. Like Shukla, Chillal lives in Pune, so Shukla pays him regular visits. "His hand is in a - I don't know how to put it - in a bag he has created. He cleans them every day, with petroleum jelly and boric acid." The nails are so fragile that the hand has been rendered useless. "He was telling me that for the last 35 years, he can hardly sleep for more than half an hour continuously, 'because every time I have to turn on my side, I have to wake up, I have to lift my hand, keep it on the other side, then turn, then sleep."
Guinness World Records maintains a database of 40,000 records, only 3,000 to 4,000 of which make it into the printed book. The competition is ferocious; the editors are flooded annually by 50,000 submissions, and three-quarters of every new edition comprises new or newly broken records. The application process is now online, but it used to be painstaking.
Shukla thinks the spread of the Internet inflamed this growth in India. Today, for no charge, a hopeful record-setter can simply make a claim through the Guinness World Records website, and Shukla sees people applying from the very towns and villages he toured during his time in advertising [he worked for the rural marketing division of Ogilvy & Mather]. It's also easier now to secure the multicamera setups that the rules require.
A record attempt follows a clean, quick arc. If the application is for a category that already exists, an official writes back within six weeks with strict guidelines for challenging the record and documenting it. If the category is new, Guinness World Records takes longer to set the rules, consulting experts to work out how the field can be quantified and standardised and what minimum figure might constitute a record. An applicant tries for the record, sends the video footage and witness affidavits to London and then waits a month or two to learn if the attempt has been successful. For a fee starting at 5,000 British pounds (about $7,500), however, an adjudicator will fly in to watch and pronounce judgment on the spot.
There are record-holders around India whom you might think of as Shukla's wards, people he nudged toward the fulfillment of their aims. One is Harshvardhan Gupta, a 24-year-old with biceps like overfed pythons, who last summer lobbed a light bulb 109.94 feet. Gupta lives with his parents on the northwest fringe of Delhi.
Initially, Gupta wasn't sure what Guinness record he wanted to set. He knew only that it wasn't going to involve push-ups. He'd been doing push-ups since he was a teenager, and in 2013 he wrote to the Hong Kong-based World Record Association to claim the record for the most half-push-ups in a minute. For his record, he did 188 in a minute. When he began browsing through the Guinness World Records website, though, the push-up categories held no attraction for him. "I wasn't feeling it," he said. "I wanted to throw." The website listed records for throwing, among other projectiles, a water balloon, a peanut and a light bulb. Gupta thought water balloons and peanuts might be tricky to master. So he went out and bought a Phillips 100-watt light bulb, went to a nearby park and threw it 104.6 feet. The record, as it stood then, was 106.7 feet.
A light bulb isn't designed for flight, and training yourself to hurl one long distances is not easy. On more than one occasion, Gupta held the bulb by its rounded glass end, clutching it so hard that it splintered. He switched his grip, so that his thumb rested on the glass curvature and the first two fingers were pressed to two parallel indentations at the bulb's bottom. He worked out daily, but he practiced his throwing only every two weeks; still, in this manner, he flung more than 500 light bulbs to their death.
I meet another ward of Shukla's, Dinesh Upadhyaya, at his Mumbai house. "I specialise in mouth-stuffing records," he says, referring to the varieties of objects he has held in his mouth for Guinness and Limca records: the most lighted candles (12), grapes (79), chopsticks (192) and straws (1,001). Upadhyaya has set Guinness records 47 times in total, many by topping his own previous record in a category or another.
The pages of the Guinness World Records book offer a remarkable parity to its stars from a country of vast inequalities like India. Shukla tells me the story of a dairy farmer from a small village near Mumbai who recently phoned him with some questions about his impending record: the most squats performed in an hour. He must have been more than 50 years old, Shukla says. He'd been doing squats for decades, as a form of exercise, but he hadn't thought of going for the record until now.
"Why now?" Shukla asked.
"My daughter is going to get married next year," the farmer told Shukla. "I want her husband's family to know that I can do something like this, that I'm worth something."
The farmer's challenge was still being processed by Guinness World Records when we spoke, so Shukla didn't know whether it was successful. "But he was happiest about the fact that the local paper carried the news, and that his family stood with him in the photograph. Really, that's all he ever wanted."
Shukla is the sole Guinness World Records representative in India, and he has since contended with many situations like this one, in which a deep enthusiasm for record-setting threatens to swamp the precise rigour of record verification. That January morning, Shukla spotted several problems right away. Participants had each been assigned an ID card with an embedded microchip, but with such an enormous assembly, it would take more than a full day to count them all. The counted and the uncounted also had to be kept apart until they had all been reckoned and the grand shaking of hands could begin. "My role is as a judge," Shukla tells me. "I can't do crowd management." He told the organisers that they had a potential disaster on their hands: "You can't tell two million people to sit quietly." It took seven hours for Shukla to count off 48,870 people and marshall them into a holding area, where, once a signal was given, they shook hands for five minutes in mock solemnity. "People were laughing and giggling, pretending to total strangers that they were old friends meeting after years," Shukla recalls. "It was electric." The record hasn't been broken since.
In recent decades, an obsession with the Guinness World Records book in India has given rise to a fevered subculture of record-setters. There are homegrown catalogues of achievement - the India Book of Records, which is distinct from the Indian Book of Records, and the Limca Book of Records, named not for a beer but for a brand of fizzy lemonade - but the Guinness World Records book holds the most allure. Nearly a tenth of all Guinness World Records submissions now come from India. In 2013, Indians applied for roughly 3,000 records, just behind the United States and Britain, and the number of Indian record-holders has grown 250 per cent over the past five years. Many of these feats are, like the orgy of handshaking, records of mass participation. In India, it is easy to rustle up a crowd: the biggest blood drive (61,902 donors); the largest motorcycle pyramid (201 men and 10 motorcycles). Individual records display manic creativity and diligence: the cultivation of ear hair 7.12 inches long; the guitar performance on Mount Everest; the 103-character sentence typed out, in 47 seconds, with a nose; the limbo-skating under a row of 39 parked cars. Some quests have a tragic edge; Sailendra Nath Roy, trying to cross a river on a zip line attached to his ponytail, died of a heart attack after his hair was caught in the pulley. Others are tinged with a different sort of pathos. Har Parkash, a 72-year-old man from New Delhi, covered his body in 366 flag tattoos, chugged a bottle of ketchup in under 40 seconds, adopted his 61-year-old brother-in-law and set several other records and then, for good measure, changed his name to Guinness Rishi, his life and identity swallowed up by his obsession.
A stolid, no-nonsense person, even Shukla cannot help marveling at his compatriots' zeal for Guinness records. He likes to tell the story of Shridhar Chillal, a man in his mid-70s who stopped clipping the nails on his left hand in 1952 and, as a consequence, holds the record for the world's longest fingernails: a combined length of 20 feet across his five fingers. Like Shukla, Chillal lives in Pune, so Shukla pays him regular visits. "His hand is in a - I don't know how to put it - in a bag he has created. He cleans them every day, with petroleum jelly and boric acid." The nails are so fragile that the hand has been rendered useless. "He was telling me that for the last 35 years, he can hardly sleep for more than half an hour continuously, 'because every time I have to turn on my side, I have to wake up, I have to lift my hand, keep it on the other side, then turn, then sleep."
Guinness World Records maintains a database of 40,000 records, only 3,000 to 4,000 of which make it into the printed book. The competition is ferocious; the editors are flooded annually by 50,000 submissions, and three-quarters of every new edition comprises new or newly broken records. The application process is now online, but it used to be painstaking.
Shukla thinks the spread of the Internet inflamed this growth in India. Today, for no charge, a hopeful record-setter can simply make a claim through the Guinness World Records website, and Shukla sees people applying from the very towns and villages he toured during his time in advertising [he worked for the rural marketing division of Ogilvy & Mather]. It's also easier now to secure the multicamera setups that the rules require.
A record attempt follows a clean, quick arc. If the application is for a category that already exists, an official writes back within six weeks with strict guidelines for challenging the record and documenting it. If the category is new, Guinness World Records takes longer to set the rules, consulting experts to work out how the field can be quantified and standardised and what minimum figure might constitute a record. An applicant tries for the record, sends the video footage and witness affidavits to London and then waits a month or two to learn if the attempt has been successful. For a fee starting at 5,000 British pounds (about $7,500), however, an adjudicator will fly in to watch and pronounce judgment on the spot.
There are record-holders around India whom you might think of as Shukla's wards, people he nudged toward the fulfillment of their aims. One is Harshvardhan Gupta, a 24-year-old with biceps like overfed pythons, who last summer lobbed a light bulb 109.94 feet. Gupta lives with his parents on the northwest fringe of Delhi.
Initially, Gupta wasn't sure what Guinness record he wanted to set. He knew only that it wasn't going to involve push-ups. He'd been doing push-ups since he was a teenager, and in 2013 he wrote to the Hong Kong-based World Record Association to claim the record for the most half-push-ups in a minute. For his record, he did 188 in a minute. When he began browsing through the Guinness World Records website, though, the push-up categories held no attraction for him. "I wasn't feeling it," he said. "I wanted to throw." The website listed records for throwing, among other projectiles, a water balloon, a peanut and a light bulb. Gupta thought water balloons and peanuts might be tricky to master. So he went out and bought a Phillips 100-watt light bulb, went to a nearby park and threw it 104.6 feet. The record, as it stood then, was 106.7 feet.
A light bulb isn't designed for flight, and training yourself to hurl one long distances is not easy. On more than one occasion, Gupta held the bulb by its rounded glass end, clutching it so hard that it splintered. He switched his grip, so that his thumb rested on the glass curvature and the first two fingers were pressed to two parallel indentations at the bulb's bottom. He worked out daily, but he practiced his throwing only every two weeks; still, in this manner, he flung more than 500 light bulbs to their death.
I meet another ward of Shukla's, Dinesh Upadhyaya, at his Mumbai house. "I specialise in mouth-stuffing records," he says, referring to the varieties of objects he has held in his mouth for Guinness and Limca records: the most lighted candles (12), grapes (79), chopsticks (192) and straws (1,001). Upadhyaya has set Guinness records 47 times in total, many by topping his own previous record in a category or another.
The pages of the Guinness World Records book offer a remarkable parity to its stars from a country of vast inequalities like India. Shukla tells me the story of a dairy farmer from a small village near Mumbai who recently phoned him with some questions about his impending record: the most squats performed in an hour. He must have been more than 50 years old, Shukla says. He'd been doing squats for decades, as a form of exercise, but he hadn't thought of going for the record until now.
"Why now?" Shukla asked.
"My daughter is going to get married next year," the farmer told Shukla. "I want her husband's family to know that I can do something like this, that I'm worth something."
The farmer's challenge was still being processed by Guinness World Records when we spoke, so Shukla didn't know whether it was successful. "But he was happiest about the fact that the local paper carried the news, and that his family stood with him in the photograph. Really, that's all he ever wanted."
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