MAMMOTH EFFORT: Basavaraju S. Gowda exhibiting his work to presspersons in Bangalore on Tuesday. — Photo: K. Gopinathan

BANGALORE: Basavaraju S. Gowda, an electrician, likes to do unusual things. He already has an entry in the Limca Book of Records for making a working model of a battery-operated windmill inside a bottle.

Now he is attempting another record. He has made the longest paper lamination without using the lamination machine. He made the 78-foot-and-4-inch-long product using a regular electric iron.

He discovered by accident that lamination is no difficult task and that you do not always need a lamination machine. Once, when he had to get an identity card laminated, he wondered if an electric iron would do the job. It did. And then he got ambitious and hit upon the idea of making the longest lamination ever, just for fun. He collected 8x10 photographs of national leaders, freedom fighters, social workers, singers and scientists. They include President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (whose picture occupies the first slot), Mother Theresa, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekar Azad, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Lal Bahadur Shastri. The last in the series is Michael Jackson.

For variety, he has added photographs of folk troupes and tourist spots. Placing 106 of these photographs side by side on the longest plastic sheet he could get, he laminated them using his own special method and turned up with his creation at the Press Club here on Tuesday.

He says that when he had bought the plastic sheet, the shopkeeper had assured him it was about 40 metres long. But he was disappointed to find that this was not so. The next time, he says, he will look out for an even longer sheet and try to make a longer lamination.

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