Kolkata: 15-year-old Arnav Daga made history as he set a new Guinness World Record (GWR) for creating the ‘world’s largest playing card structure.
As per the official website of Guinness World Records, ‘Arnav built a structure using around 143,000 playing cards. It features 4 landmarks from Kolkata (Shaheed Minar, St Paul’s Cathedral, Salt Lake Stadium, and Writer’s Building) and took 41 days to complete.’
The structure is 12.21 m (40 ft) in length, 3.47 m (11 ft 4 in) in height, and 5.08 m (16 ft 8 in) in width.
The website further quoted, ‘Before commencing construction, Arnav visited all four sites to closely study their architecture and work out their dimensions. A task he found more challenging was finding a suitable site for his own card architecture. Requiring a tall, airtight space with a flat floor, he viewed “close to 30” places before settling on one.’
‘Arnav drew a basic outline of each building on the floor to ensure that they were accurately aligned before he started stacking. His technique involves using “grids” (four horizontal cards standing at right angles) and “vertical cells” (four vertical cards inclined towards each other at right angles)’, the website said.
According to GWR, Arnav has been card stacking since he was eight years old. He began to take it more seriously during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, as he found himself with a lot of free time to practise his passion.
Due to having limited space in his room, he began by creating smaller structures, some of which can be seen on his YouTube channel, ‘arnavinnovates’.
