As I take my seat across a very gung ho Mohsin Haq at a café, he conjures newspaper cuttings, certificates and hotel bills from his backpack faster than I can say, ‘Hello’.u00a0“I’ve got all the evidence, you know,” says the 29 year-old relationship manager, who lives in Marol and works for a US-based finance company. “And here,” he says, “Here’s the final evidence.”

He shows me his newly-acquired Guinness World Records certificate, neatly placed in a plastic file, clearly saving the best for last. On October 2, 2011, Haq took off on his Royal Enfield bike (purchased specially for the trip) from the Gateway of India, rode 18,301 km across India’s 28 states and seven union territories in 56 days, and returned to the same spot on November 26, 2011. The feat earned him a Guinness World Record of covering the record distance in a single country, since Haq broke the record of two Canadians who rode 16,240 km across China in 64 days in 2010.

Haq is one of the 157 Guinness World Record holders in 2011, a sharp rise from the 41 record holders just five years ago, in 2006. Applications from India have grown more than 400 per cent in the past five years — last year, we made the third largest number of record applications to the body — right behind the US and UK. Little wonder that Guinness World Records announces the launch of its Indian operations today. The country will now have a local official, Nikhil Shukla, to oversee applications and operations, an Indian website, and an Indian office by 2013.

Historically speaking
What just happened? A lot, it seems, if you look at the average Indian-trying-to-be-a-Guinness-record-holder, and numbers have the least to do with it.
In 1995, cultural critic and historian Vinay Lal wrote the essay Indians and the Guinness Book of Records — The Political and Cultural Contours of a National Obsession. The essay is incisive, sinking its teeth into our fetish for records to reveal what Lal then saw as a manifestation of “the Indian anxiety first generated during the colonial period, and subsequently aggravated by the process of nation-building and over masculinity, that accounts to a great degree for the quest among Indians to have their names etched in the Guinness Book.”