I apologize for not putting up a blog in a while – I’ve been involved in organizing a celebration in honor of my spiritual teacher’s birthday. Every year, hundreds of Sri Chinmoy’s students from around the world come to Queens, New York, to join in the festivities. Although the celebration centers mostly around prayer and meditation, there are other activities including classical music performances and sports competitions. Also, recently, it has become a tradition for a small group of us to break a Guinness record by building something GIANT.
A few years ago, we succeeded in creating the world’s largest bouquet and we presented the magnificent flower arrangement to Sri Chinmoy on his birthday. It was made up of 100,000 roses and, afterwards, we invited everyone in the neighborhood to take armfuls of roses home. For days, the entire area smelled like a rose garden!
In 2005 we presented Sri Chinmoy with a cake with 27,000 lit candles on it and last year we built the world’s largest sculpture made out of just popcorn and corn syrup. It was a 20-foot cake decorated like an Indian temple. Afterwards, we offered chunks of the caramelized popcorn to the neighbors, but the enthusiasm was dismal compared to the roses!
I apologize for not putting up a blog in a while – I’ve been involved in organizing a celebration in honor of my spiritual teacher’s birthday. Every year, hundreds of Sri Chinmoy’s students from around the world come to Queens, New York, to join in the festivities. Although the celebration centers mostly around prayer and meditation, there are other activities including classical music performances and sports competitions. Also, recently, it has become a tradition for a small group of us to break a Guinness record by building something GIANT.
A few years ago, we succeeded in creating the world’s largest bouquet and we presented the magnificent flower arrangement to Sri Chinmoy on his birthday. It was made up of 100,000 roses and, afterwards, we invited everyone in the neighborhood to take armfuls of roses home. For days, the entire area smelled like a rose garden!
In 2005 we presented Sri Chinmoy with a cake with 27,000 lit candles on it and last year we built the world’s largest sculpture made out of just popcorn and corn syrup. It was a 20-foot cake decorated like an Indian temple. Afterwards, we offered chunks of the caramelized popcorn to the neighbors, but the enthusiasm was dismal compared to the roses!
This year we were thinking of constructing the world’s largest pencil. About ten years ago some friends and I built a 20-foot pencil in honor of Sri Chinmoy’s completion of a series of 27,000 poems. Then, in 2002, the art supply company, Faber Castell, obliterated our record by building a 64-foot pencil which is currently standing upright in front of their factory in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Since Sri Chinmoy’s 76th birthday is coming up, we’ve been contemplating creating a 76-foot writing instrument to get the record back. I can’t even imagine the size of the pencil sharpener that would have to accompany it!
Anyway, I went in for a haircut the other day and I was telling the barber about the pencil idea. He is familiar with our tradition of Guinness projects because he happened to see the massive bouquet. I related the story of how in 1998 we got the record with a 20-foot pencil, but a famous pencil company later broke it. Suddenly, he stopped cutting my hair and stared at me, aghast in disbelief. “What?”, he exclaimed, “You mean those bad people were jealous of your pencil and came and smashed it into pieces? That is deplorable!”
We both burst out laughing when I was finally able to explain that I meant that Faber Castell broke our record, not our pencil! He was relieved to hear that our 20-foot pencil is still alive and well and currently hanging in the Guinness Museum in Niagara Falls, Canada. Then, I gave the barber another laugh when I described our search for the graphite that we would need for our 76-foot pencil. I told him that we had scoured the country for a company that could provide us with 10-inch diameter graphite and the only supplier that we could find was located in, of all places, Penn-sylvania!
