Shridhar Chillal’s fingernails, on display at the New York Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! in Times Square. Photo by Marc Hartzman.
If you grew up reading the Guinness Book of Records, a few images from the first twenty pages are probably as burned into your memory as they are mine: Robert Wadlow, towering over friends and family at 8’-11” tall; Robert Earl Hughes, the world’s heaviest man who weighed in at 1,069 pounds; and Shridhar Chillal. He was the guy with the insanely long fingernails.
Earlier this year he cut them off after 66 years of growth on his left hand. Their combined length: 29 feet, 10.1 inches.
This display shows Chillal with his fingernails just before cutting them off.
The nails are on display at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! in Times Square. I finally paid a visit and couldn’t stop staring at them.
They are extraordinary.
It’s not only the length and the curled nature of the nails, but the thickness of the keratin makes them look as if they came from some form of reptilian creature and gives you a sense of how heavy they must have been dangling from Chillal’s fingers. For 66 years.
The human mind is capable of incredible determination and the body can grow in such wondrous ways.
Now 82 years old, the man from Poona, India started growing out his nails when he was 14 years old. It all began after a teacher chastised him for breaking his long nail. The teacher said Chillal couldn’t understand the severity of the situation because the young student never been committed to anything.
He took the challenge seriously.
Naturally, Chillal’s nails caused a few issues for him along the way. It made his job as a photographer extra challenging, but a customized handle helped him operate his camera. He couldn’t type. And he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since the ‘50s.
In this photo from the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, Chillal’s fingernails look short in comparison.
“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,” he told Guinness World Records in 2015. He didn’t comment on other handicaps, so your imagination will just have to sort out some answers.
Despite the difficulties, Chillal has enjoyed a happy life with his wife, two children and three grandchildren.
