Why Is India So Crazy for World Records?

choi

Samanth Subramanian, We're No 1; Why Is India So Crazy for World Records?  New York Times Magazine, Jan 25, 2015.
www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/magaz ... r-world-records.htm

Excerpt in the window of print: [Nikhil] Shukla[, the Guinness World Records representative in India,] told me of Shridhar Chillal, whose fingernails measure 20 feet across five fingers. 'His hand is in a — I don’t know how to put it — in a bag he has created.'

My comment:
(a) The text around the quotation is as follows.

"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."

"[C]ombined length." So it is 20 feet for five fingernails total, not each (nail).
(b) Just view photos; there is no need to read text.
(c) It seems to me that China are equally obsessed.
(d) The Indian name Subramanian: "Hindu name from Sanskrit subrahmānya ‘dear to Brahmans’ (an epithet of the god Kartikeya, son of Shiva) + the Tamil-Malayalam third-person masculine singular suffix -n."