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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Guns, guitars and odd curiosities
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Guns, guitars and odd curiosities

Aakar Patel's insatiable and eclectic thirst for weird and wonderful things

A 1963 Fender Telecaster Custom guitar that belonged to John Lennon (centre) displayed at an exhibition called Travelling Guitars in 2006. Photo: Benoit Tessier/ReutersPremium
A 1963 Fender Telecaster Custom guitar that belonged to John Lennon (centre) displayed at an exhibition called Travelling Guitars in 2006. Photo: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Do you chat with airport security men about their firearms? I do, because I’m like that. Also because I am very interested in such things. Sometime ago, at Delhi airport, waiting for our bags, I wagered my friend, the former bureaucrat and writer Sanjeev Ahluwalia, that I would identify the first gun we came across. It was a beautiful Heckler & Koch MP5, as the guard carrying it confirmed to Ahluwalia. If I remember it right, he still owes me.

The ugly INSAS rifles, which are locally made, and the old SLRs and Stens are quite easy to pick out for many. I can even tell an AK-47 from an AK-74 at a glance (this is easy to do: The former’s banana-shaped magazine has a more pronounced curve to accommodate the larger round). Incidentally, the Indian soldiers carrying these refer to them not by their name but their calibre. “7.62", as one said to me when I asked him what he was usually armed with, a 47 or a 74. Such interest in machines is unusual among Indians (no, I am not ranting about that today), but of course it is commonplace among Americans.

The most popular automatic rifle there is the Armalite-designed AR-15 and its variants. So many accessories are available and fussed over by American owners of this rifle that the AR-15 is commonly called the “Barbie for men". Personally, I have no interest in owning or firing the guns. I only like the knowing. It is a guy thing.

My curiosity about such things is not limited to guns. I was obsessed by guitars once and studied them in some detail. In the Surat of 25 years ago, before the Internet and in a city with no book stores (yes, I am not kidding), this was a difficult interest to pursue. Not least because almost none of the guitars I could identify by sight, and often sound, and whose histories I had memorized, I had actually ever held or even seen. I had only seen their photographs and heard records of them being played. It has been a long time, but I can still tell the earliest Les Pauls from the slightly later ones, and the Standards from the Customs. The first Fender I held was the one I bought many years later after moving to Mumbai (a very nice black American-made Standard Stratocaster with a rosewood neck, previously owned by Ehsaan Noorani of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy fame).

I have played it very little since buying it, being no longer interested in popular music. But I do not think the time, and it was many, many hours that I spent studying the shapes and sounds of instruments I would likely never see or touch, was wasted.

Another oddity: I rarely take my car out, given the traffic of Bengaluru and the lack of parking space. But I often sit in the garage and turn it on to listen to the burble of its 4.8-litre V8 engine (skilled motor-heads will have identified the make by that one clue alone). It is a glorious sound, particularly at low revs. It reminds me of a machine I read and researched about a lot as a child, the Supermarine Spitfire and the growl of its Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

The warplanes of World War II, mainly British, German and Japanese, I also know something about. I can still identify most if not all of them from their silhouette alone—Mosquitos, Stukas, Zeroes, Messerschmitts and the rest. I don’t know as much about American planes from the same era because it was the British books of the war that I read.

Such interest in and knowledge of unusual trivia I have had since I was a child. Large parts of the Guinness Book of World Records I memorized (is that a record, I wonder) when I was around 12 or so. This might have been born of the fact that there were (and are) few people in Surat one can have a proper conversation with. Also the fact that, as I have said, books were hard to come by and those I had I spent a lot of time with.

The diligent editors of this newspaper often correct the dates and facts I refer to in this column, which I often write from memory when travelling. I am asking that they not correct the following factoids, even if they be slightly off, to demonstrate how sticky some of the knowledge is. The world’s fattest man all those years ago, a record doubtless overwhelmed now in our more corpulent times, was Robert Earl Hughes, who, if he could look down at his weighing scale, would see it clock 1,048 pounds (around 475kg). The world’s fattest twins were Billy and Benny Hines, whose combined weight I cannot remember, and the world’s tallest man was Robert Wadlow, who was 7ft, 11 inches. This was around 1982 or so.

Do you remember such things, weird but wonderful, collected over the years? I hope so. My interests may be varied and unusual but I know I am not alone in visiting these eclectic spaces in desultory fashion.

Such curiosity is rewarded by small things, little discoveries, beautiful moments. These things have added something to my character, though I am unsure what.

Aakar Patel is executive director of Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are personal.

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Published: 24 Sep 2015, 05:51 PM IST
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