My last column here touched on the pursuit of records. Specifically, the way I think such pursuits diminished a great cricketer, Kapil Dev. Though of course it isn’t just him. Records draw people like a magnet gathers iron filings, if you’ll excuse the clumsy metaphor.

In my youth, I thought records, by definition, were set by athletes: Bob Beamon leaping 8.90 metres at the 1968 Mexico Olympics to smash the previous long jump mark, for example. To me, these men and women had reached for a pinnacle of training, conditioning and achievement, and setting a record just underlined that. Thus the only records I knew of at the time were ones like these—“fastest", “strongest", “highest"; in that Olympic vein.

But then I began following cricket, and here were records of another type: “most". The most wickets, most runs, most catches and endless variations on those. Some of these seemed reasonable enough to me, but not all, and for this reason I couldn’t quite imagine a cricketer getting excited about them. I mean, I can imagine a batsman relishing being the fastest to 5,000 Test runs, for example. I cannot imagine a batsman similarly relishing scoring the most runs in Tests played at the Wankhede stadium, for example. It is an achievement, and maybe it speaks of others, but is it an achievement in the same sense that getting to 5,000 faster than anyone else is?

Yet, somewhere deep inside wherever cricket statistics are stored, I’m almost certain there is an entry for runs scored at the Wankhede, along with whoever holds that record. For cricket is nothing if not a game of numbers. It’s just that some of those numbers don’t do much for me. The “most" numbers, mostly.

This is why Kapil Dev’s record left me cold, and that’s quite apart from the depressing way he went about getting there (recounted in that last column). A collection that’s bigger than anyone else’s loses some of its cachet when you realize it can come from simply playing a large number of matches, especially when the man is crawling to the mark, figuratively and otherwise. Think of it this way: it was by no means inevitable that Beamon would set his record simply by long-jumping for years and years. Whereas Kapil Dev’s record was inevitable in that sense; play cricket long enough and you’ll have the most wickets.

So yes, it was cricket that got me used to the idea of records of the “most" kind. Then came my encounter with something called the Guinness Book, and cousins like the Limca Book, Malaysian Book and no doubt others. These spoke of the usual fastest, strongest, highest and so on, with their variations, and also “longest", “thinnest", “oldest", “shortest" and no doubt more. Thus, you’ll find recorded somewhere in those books an entry for the person with the longest fingernails. The oldest cat, the oldest mother. The smallest waist. The most people washing their hands. The longest time anyone has walked backwards, the fastest time to walk 20 metres with feet facing backwards, the largest backwards walk and so on.

Fascinating, I’ll admit. What makes someone decide to walk backwards into the pages of a book? Or memorize pi to 70,000 digits? Or blow the largest bubblegum bubble ever? These books are nothing if not a tribute to the infinite peculiarity of humankind. And yet I’m left wondering that although both are records, what really is the connection between Beamon’s awesome long jump mark and the 1,107 people in Indore who walked backwards on 2 March 2014 to earn themselves the “largest backwards walk" Guinness world record?

Athletes strive every day to beat Beamon’s record. In fact, Mike Powell did beat it in 1991. Do people strive every day to beat the Indore backwards-walkers? In a sense, it would be easy. All you need is 1,108 people. Many more than that travel in any given coach of a Bombay suburban train during rush hour. Get them to walk backwards when they reach VT and you have a new Guinness record.

It’s not something people are trying to accomplish every day. There is no doubt, however, that there’s someone trying a variation. Walking backwards with milk bottles on their heads, perhaps—or has that been done already?

Thing is, there are records and then there are records. Guinness taught me that, but it may have really sunk home one day some years ago in Bangalore. Totally by chance, I stumbled on a record attempt by a Dr Ramesh Babu. In a community hall in Malleswaram, he set up a carrom board, a few blackboards and some towels. A few attendants, too. This was his attempt to set an “inaugural world record": playing solo carrom for 24 hours straight.

I was simply mesmerized by this effort. I returned to that hall several times during those 24 hours, including at 3am, simply to watch the good doctor go at it. (I might have myself qualified for an inaugural world record for trips made to see a man attempting an inaugural world record).

Every time he finished a board, he’d rise, flex his fingers and neck, rub himself down—must wipe off the sweat, of course—and then move to the opposite side of the board to resume his assault on his inaugural world record. Meanwhile, attendants would scramble to add to the statistics on the boards; “whites taken before first black", “minutes to clear board" and the like. Other attendants handed out pamphlets detailing the good doctor’s previous record-setting attempts. They included flying a kite with the longest tail, playing solo table tennis with one half of the table folded vertically and—my favourite—cutting a cucumber into upwards of 120,000 pieces.

I don’t know if Dr Babu’s efforts—whether carrom, kite or vegetable-oriented—made it into Guinness or Limca or some other book of records. I do know that as I watched him, I asked myself the question above several times.

What really is the connection between Beamon’s awesome long jump mark and this solo carrom campaign?

None.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but it does makes me wonder. Let’s celebrate the infinite peculiarity of humankind, sure. But let’s also remember the sanctity of the term “world record". No asterisks, no caveats, no inevitability. Just jaw-dropping achievement.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Jukebox Mathemagic: Always One More Dance.

His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun

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