From kitchen vessels to Guinness record!

When he was a boy, Prashant Gaikwad used to make do with his mother's kitchen vessels to play tabla. On Saturday, the tabla teacher from 

Bhavan's B P Vidya Mandir school in the city, played his way into the record books by playing tabla non-stop for 324 hours. 

If his entry is recognised, he will break the earlier Guinness records held by G Ramakrishnana (301 hours) from Kerala and Paramjot Singh (310 hours) from Ludhiana. Gaikwad began playing tabla from 9.30 am on April 19 and ended it at 9.30 pm on Saturday. 

Gaikwad, even in his wildest dreams, would have never thought of making it so big. He belonged to an extremely poor family. Now a Sangeet Visharad, Sangeet Prabhakar and Sangeet Alankar in music with a post graduation degree in fine arts from Nagpur University, Gaikwad never had money to pay for his school and college fees. He worked as a manual labourer, even dug wells for his fees. Delighted at his son's achievement father, Madhavaro Gaikwad, who repaired and sold harmoniums and mother Usha, a teacher at a vocational training centre said that they had never imagined that their son would set a world record some day. 

When Gaikwad sat to play the tabla for breaking the earlier record of 301 hours held by Kerala's G Ramakrishnana (on Mridang), he did not know that someone else in India was already playing tabla since April 5 and would break this record on the very next day. As per his plan, Gaikwad was to finish playing the tabla somewhere on Friday night around 10.30 pm. But when he got to know that Paramjot Singh, a primary school teacher from Ludhiana, had already broken Ramkrishnana's record on April 20 and then improved on his own record again and played tabla for 310 hours on April 30, Gaikwad decided to play tabla to break all these records. 

Gaikwad followed all the rules to make it to the record. One can take a break of five minutes after each hour or accumulate them together and take a break after few hours. A panel of judges consisting professionals, Shailgram Satav (MA from Khairagad music university, Chhattisgarh), Rekha Kumar, Notary, Dr Devendra Ghadge have monitored Gaikwad's have been monitoring Gaikwad's performance in these 13 days.