I think we can all basically agree there is no better part of any given Guinness World Records book than the section about people with extreme body stuff going on. Sure, the parts about guys doing record-breaking motorcycle jumps or whatever are okay, but what we’re really here for is the people who are like 9 feet tall and those guys who can pop their eyeballs out of their head. That’s the real good shit.
To that end, you may or may not be aware of Shridhar Chillal – the man with the longest fingernails in the world. The 82-year-old, from Pune, India, managed to grow his left hand nails to a collective length of about 29 feet, 10 inches over the course of 66 years. It’s absolutely one of things which makes you think W H Y D O T H I S but at the same time… whatever, dude. You do you.
But no longer. This week, Chillal flew out to New York to remove the frankly quite horrifying growths of crusty keratin.
He told Guinness World Records, who supervised the removal of the nails, that they were causing him a great deal of pain and were – shock horror – kind of inconvenient:
I am in pain. With every heart beat all five fingers, my wrist, elbow and shoulder are hurting a lot and at the tip of the nail there’s a burning sensation always.
He told HuffPost India back in 2016 that he had difficulty moving thanks to his mighty claws. “I can’t move much, so every half an hour or so I wake up and move my hand to the other side of the bed.”
Chillal tried to cut the nails himself with a clipper, despite the fact that his thumbnail looked like a legit tree branch, and unsurprisingly had little success. The doctor who performed the removal ultimately relied on a handheld power grinder to get the job done, in a process that took about twenty minutes.
You can watch it below, if that’s the kind of stuff you’re into.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoYzpesr4c
Well, Shridhar. I hope you absolutely make the most of the rest of your life, no longer inhibited by your horrific nail situation. I guarantee you it is worth losing the world record for.
