Just for the record 5opened
Scores of records are set and broken in India every year, by individuals, communities and the country as a whole. They tend to be a mix of accidental, intentional and outright bizarre. Take a tour of the most remarkable ones from recent years
Talking to record holders, you hear the same thing over and over — “I just wanted to go down for something; I wanted my name in the books”. The activity with which they eventually achieve this goal is often incidental. Yes, the man with the most tattoos loves tattoos and the stories they can tell. But the man with the largest number of toothpicks in his beard, the woman who spun the world’s largest hula hoop, or the couple with the record for the longest kiss, they just wanted to get into the books. Sometimes it’s even a pastiche of talents, thrown together to create something that is unique largely because no one else thought of it — like the young man with the record of the most Rubik’s cubes solved while riding a unicycle.
To ask what motivates people to set or break records, one must ask what motivates them to begin with. There are generally three classifications within which all human motivation falls: the needs for achievement, power, or belonging (affiliation). This is an old, established, and accepted theory of needs, put forth by David Mcclelland in the 1960s. The three needs are abbreviated nach, npow, and naff.
In a world where the mountains have all been scaled and the remotest islands long discovered, a burning need for achievement can tap into a talent and see a person end up at the Olympics or, in the absence of a Phelpsian ability to snake through water, pick a random niche to own.
The truth is, there’s a record seeker in everyone. Each of us has awarded tags to ourselves in our heads, or out loud: most popular in the group, most attractive, one who can drink the rest under the table, one who gives the best gifts, or throws the best parties.
What tempers the drive to excel, in most humans, is the counter-balancing need to fit in. A person wants many of the same things as the rest of the species — comfort, companionship, something to nurture or care for — and so they make peace with being the one in the group who gets the most Facebook greetings on birthdays and don’t aim for the global tag of most tattooed man or woman.
It helps that there are other kinds of records. There are the high school yearbooks and slambooks where most people have a shot at being “most likely to” something or “best at” something else. There are the workplaces and communities, Rotary Clubs and associations that recognise and, from time to time, reward, the varied contributions of members.
It gets a bit more complicated when nations go after records of their own. What does it take to have the world’s biggest dam or tallest statue, and which one is the better goal? What happens to the way a country sees itself when it consistently has the world’s largest defence budget, or the smallest? What does it mean to the ecology when two powerful neighbours compete to drill higher and higher into the Himalayas?
Here’s a look at some of the records India, and Indians, have set in recent years, and the impacts they have had.
IN A WORLD WHERE THE MOUNTAINS HAVE ALL BEEN SCALED, A BURNING NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT CAN SEE A PERSON END UP AT THE OLYMPICS... OR PICK A RANDOM NICHE TO OWN
layan mountain range, built with an eye on defence, and also ushering remote valleys that were frozen in time into the 21st century.
The engineering marvel, a term deservedly used almost as often as its name, was 20 years in the making. It took seven years just to drill through the Pir Panjal range, sometimes at the rate of half a metre a day.
The tunnel — a crucial transit way for the Indian Army, which can now use it to send supplies faster and more reliably to the India-china Line of Actual Control — also opens up the possibility of further such developments at Leh and Ladakh, further north. Already, the Atal Tunnel has shrunk the distance between Lahaul and Manali from 43 km to 9 km, and travel time from 4 hours to just 10 minutes. For local residents, it’s an all-weather gamechanger. Lahaul need no longer be marooned in winter. Supplies and medical help are now finally a short ride away.
Increased traffic has brought the first robberies to the valleys, though. An entire village also tested positive for Covid-19. And drifts of litter — tourists’ plastic bottles and chips packets, mainly — now litter their once-pristine landscape. The benefit also needs to be weighed against the impact of the tunnel, and the others that may follow, on the highly sensitive ecology of the Himalayas.
Most bank accounts in one week
1.81 crore, under the Pradhan Mantri Jan-dhan Yojana
It was one of the biggest schemes announced in the year that Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office, a flagship financial inclusion programme launched during his first Independence Day speech.
Following the announcement on August 15, a drive that stretched from August 23 to 29 saw 18.1 million accounts opened across 36 banks in India. A year later, the number had mushroomed to 175 million accounts opened.
The idea was to provide at least one zero-balance account to every household in the country that wasn’t already in the banking system. Each account came with a debit card. This way, benefits from various employment and relief schemes could go directly to the recipients without getting lost or siphoned off along the otherwise complicated network and indirect delivery chain.
There have been glitches. Among the estimated 400 million PMJDY accounts now in existence, some are fake, set up specifically to siphon off benefits; other have been opened by legitimate beneficiaries but are being operated by those misappropriating funds. But the accounts have helped the government reach out to the most vulnerable during the coronavirus disease pandemic, directly transferring cash.
6 Tiger census 2018 Largest camera trap wildlife survey; nearly 27,000 locations across 141 sites
The world’s largest camera trap wildlife survey was conducted over an area of 1.21 lakh sq km, spread across 20 states in India. It captured 35 million photographs, including 77,000 images of tigers and another 52,000 of leopards.
This was the most scientifically and statistically accurate effort ever made to estimate India’s tiger population — a vital number for a species that was so endangered as recently as the 1970s that a national project was launched to save it.
At the time, there were about 1,000 left in the wild. Happily, there are about 2,967 of the magnificent beasts living in the wild today — still a small number in itself, but good news in that it’s up from 1,411 in 2006. And an upward tick that’s a joy to the world, since the species found here (the Royal Bengal tiger) is found nowhere else on Earth outside the Indian subcontinent.
Before the camera traps, tiger surveys were conducted on foot, by forest officers and naturalists who studied pugmarks and scat to try and tell one tiger from the other. As the technology used has become more advanced, the number has steadily risen — partly because the counts are more accurate; partly because the populations are growing in clusters.
As with most things, there’s good news and bad. The bad news is that habitats are shrinking. India currently houses 75% of the world’s tigers (including the other species) in about 25% of the world’s tiger habitat space.
Even within what’s left here at home, roads are being built through reserves, encroachers are constructing homes that range from huts to high-rises in buffer zones.
The surveys are conducted every four years, and, soon, the massive operation will begin all over again. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and Wildlife Institute of India (WII), in association with various state forest departments and conservation NGOS, will send hundreds of forest officials, scientists and volunteers trekking across 100-sq-km grids, to plant motion-sensor camera traps wherever signs of a tiger’s presence can be detected.
It takes about 18 months just to finish the survey, study the findings, use software to match stripe patterns and extract a final count.
Meanwhile, as the gorgeous tiger attracts all the attention — alongside other popular beasts like the elephant and dolphin — we risk losing sight of the bigger picture. The pangolins, the little frogs, lizards and butterflies in the Western Ghats that are also found nowhere else on earth. The reserves themselves, under constant attack as we try to maximise the resources they hold beneath the ground. Which is why, as they say, a little good news can be such a bad thing.
7 Most diamonds on a single ring
12,638, by Harshit Bansal of Renani Jewels
Diamonds are 25-year-old Harshit Bansal’s best friend. Specifically, the 12,638 that he used to break the world record for most diamonds in a single ring. He calls the ring the Marigold.
Three years in the making, this ornament was designed to break the existing record, held by Kotti Srikanth of Hallmark Jewellers, another Indian business. That ring held a mere 7,801 diamonds, but it was part of what is now an unbroken chain of five Indian companies to set new records for most diamonds in a ring, over the space of five years.
It all began when the Jaipur-based Savio Jewellers placed 3,827 diamonds in a ring shaped like a peacock, in 2015, and became the first Indian company to break a record held by a Ukrainian company called the Lobortas Classic Jewellery House. The Lobortas House had placed 2,525 diamonds in ring called the Tsarevna Swan.
In 2018, the Savio Jewellers peacock ring record was merrily shattered by Surat-based Vishal and Khushbu Agarwal, with a lotus ring that held 6,690 diamonds.
The following year, Lakshikaa Jewellers set 7,777 diamonds in a ring inspired by the Lotus Temple. They held the record until October 2020, when Srikanth released his Hallmark flower. And now they can all sit back and sigh at Bansal’s Marigold, certified by Guinness on November 30.
Bansal was still in college when he first noticed this glittering record race heating up. He started Renani Jewellers two years ago, but had begun conceptualising the ring even earlier, while studying jewellery design. He harboured an immense passion, he says, to craft and create a record-breaking diamond ring all by himself.
“I just had to figure out a way to maximise the surface area to set the diamonds,” Bansal adds. “By 2018, the design was ready.”
The Marigold is made up of eight layers of asymmetrical petals. The diamonds weigh a total of 38.08 carats. “We sifted through lakhs of diamonds to find just the perfect ones to fit the ring,” he says. “It feels good. My family is happy, and I think the whole market is happy!”
Each of the record-breaking rings costs crores. Bansal is even planning on mass manufacturing his design. It’s an interesting record for India to hold — reflective, at the same time, of the country’s intense love for bling, its willingness to go the extra mile to make a splash and its sense of newfound aspiration.