Thiruvananthapuram: On a table before him, Arvind Kumar Pai has neatly laid out his laptop bag and a plastic cover. He takes out of this cover, bundles of ten-rupee notes, one after the other.
There are more than a thousand of them, 1004 to be precise. His fingers then move to the bottom of a note, and points to the currency number. 11251958, he says, the day his mother was born.
Tuesday, she turns 56, a birthday he knew he had to make different for her. After the enormity of last year’s gift – that landed both their names in the Limca Book of Records - he had to make sure this birthday is special too.
“11-25 is the month-date format, the kind followed in the US. I got that idea after reading about World Pi Day that was celebrated on March 14, because Pi is numerically 3.14,” says Arvind, a young secretary to an old business tycoon.
The idea evolved into collecting ten-rupee notes that would have this month-date combination in its currency number. He ran from bank to bank, branch to branch to collect them. “I didn’t want to go to one bank alone and raise unnecessary suspicions.”
A year ago, he gifted his mother a greeting card that had the largest number of stamps on an envelope. “322 stamps, because my birthday is on March 22.”
His craving to make these records come from a desire to do something different because of the hassles he faced as a child with epilepsy, the years he lived with the support of his mother Renjitha Bai.
“I also admire Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar who has so many records,” he says. Arvind is expecting to make several more records for his largest Gandhian stamp collection, a habit he started 21 years ago, after his late father Muraleedhara Babu gave him his first stamp.
