Buddy With World's Longest Fingernails Finally Cuts Them, Leaving His Hand In ROUGH Shape
It’s the end of an era for the man who holds the world record for Longest Fingernails on One Hand.
Shridhar Chillal, of Pune, India, hadn’t cut the fingernails on his left hand since 1952, when he was 14 and a teacher got mad at him for breaking a nail.
Chillal decided to see how long he could grow them, even though the Guinness Book of World Records didn’t exist then.
The 82-year-old record holder managed to get his nails to grow a collective length of about 29 feet, 10 inches before being officially honored by Guinness in November 2014.
But he decided to cut away an important part of his life earlier this week when he flew to New York to have the nails removed by a doctor.
The nails are now on display at the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Odditorium in Times Square.
“I was a little bit scared that my celebrity favor would go now, but today after coming here I realize that after this I have become a real celebrity,” Chillal told Patch New York through an interpreter. “Now, forever my nails will be remembered and forever my nails will be seen by people from all over the world.”
There were other reasons why Chillal was willing to cut away an important part of his life: The collective weight of the nails has made it impossible for Chillal to open his hand from a closed position or flex his fingers.
“I am in pain,” he told Guinness World Records. “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.”
Chillal attempted to cut his supersized nails with a manual clipper, but that didn’t work. The doctor used a hand-held power grinder in a process that took about 20 minutes, according to Patch New York.
No word on how Chillal is adapting to the lighter load on his left hand, but life just became easier for him in many ways. In 2015, he told HuffPost India how hard it was to sleep with his long nails.
“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.”
Shridhar Chillal’s left hand is completely DESTROYED. Look at this MONSTROSITY.
So many people do weird things in hopes to be recognized, so the fact that Shridhar began growing his fingernails as a personal challenge makes him that much more crazy. A teacher scolded him for breaking a nail, and then he never cut them again. SINCE 1952!!! This is like a poorly-written origin story for a super-villain. When his teacher scolded him, he decided his nemesis would be clippers.
When the record was made official in 2014, he told Guinness World Records:
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.
At that point, you think okay, now that this dude’s got the recognition, he’s gonna cut his nails, right? Nope! Shridhar continued to grow his nails for FOUR MORE YEARS! He purposely continued cripple his left hand to the point that he cannot move it.
To the point that Shridhar was worried about losing his celebrity status, that actually holds some weight because he appeared in Jackass 2.5, when Steve-o nail-luged a beer down his left hand.
Other than that, however, I have never seen him in anything. I don’t know if a cameo in Jackass is worth waking up every half hour to move your hand to the other side of the bed because you are harvesting 30 feet of fingernails, but that’s just me.