Kovai students’ bid to enter Guinness via paper mosaic

As many as 167 boys and girls from classes six to eleven took part in the event for 4 hours. With cups in four colours - light and dark orange, brown and black - they started making the mosaic on an area of 981 square metres on Thursday. In all they used 2.35 lakh paper cups. The attempt was to break the record that was set at Lucknow on 627 square metres using 1,40,000 cups in 4 hours and 15 minutes in April 2016. Students said when the idea of masking a record attempt with a face was thrown before them, they had unanimously come out with the name of Kalam.

Correspondent of the school Poongothai Arul Ramesh said that the students were trained to work as an individual and as a group to complete the mosaic in a lesser time, as they had to break the existing record. This helped them complete the attempt 15 minutes ahead of the previous record. “Proceedings of the entire attempt were video recorded and sent to the Guinness office along with the affidavits of surveyors, witnesses and stewards to be appointed as per the guidelines,” she said. 

Poongothai said that this was the second record attempt by the school. The previous one was in 2013 when they made the largest postcard mosaic of the image of a tiger with the theme ‘Save Tiger’.