by VINAY LAL
“‘Rubber Man’ Vijay Sharma demonstrates his flexibility by winding his arms around his back and wrapping then around his waist in Delhi” PHOTO/Daily Mail
What is it about the Guinness Book of World Records that makes Indians dizzy with longing and anticipation and sends them on a bizarre journey of self-gratification? A number of public commentators, among them a New York Times correspondent, appear to have stumbled upon this phenomenon in recent months, but it is something that struck my attention nearly twenty years ago, leading to a longish essay that I first published in the stylish but short-lived journal Suitcase in 1995 and since published in a revised essay in my collection, Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Seagull Books, 2003; paperback edition, Penguin Books, 2005).
Last year, apparently at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a man who is rather keen on records—witness, for example, the infamous jacket on which his name had been embroidered with gold color thread in stripes, or the construction that is afoot to build the largest statue in the world just outside Baroda, a monument of faith and folly to Sardar Patel, the architect (as the statue seeks to recognize) of Indian “unity”—the UN General Assembly, which Modi addressed in September at the annual conclave of the heads of government, agreed to designate June 21st as International Yoga Day.
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