Professor eyes world record with non-stop 130-hour lecture

A Dehradun assistant professor began his marathon lecture on Saturday morning to break the Guinness Book record of 121 hours in the non-stop lecturing category. The proceedings are being watched by a panel of the Guinness Book of World Records.

A Dehradun assistant professor began his marathon lecture on Saturday morning to break the Guinness Book record of 121 hours in the non-stop lecturing category.

Assistant-professor-Arvind-Mishra-on-the-first-day-of-his-during-his-5-day-non-stop-lecture-in-Dehradun-on-Saturday-Rish-Ballabh-Hindustan-Times

The proceedings are being relayed live on www.marathonlecture.in and watched by a panel of the Guinness Book of World records.

Arvind Mishra, 26, assistant professor at THE Mechanical Engineering department of the Graphic Era University in Dehradun, began his lecture at 6am. He proposes to continue it for 130 hours nonstop, which means lecturing for five days at a stretch.

If successful, he would break the world record set by Polish national Errol Muzawazi who gave 121-hour lecture on democracy and cultural dialogue. The topic of Mishra’s lecture is ‘scientific computation’.

Prior to Errol Muzawazi’s record, an Indian professor held the record for delivering a 120-hour non-stop lecture. Arvind belongs to Kanpur and had been preparing for the feat since 2009. He has already delivered a marathon lecture of 110 hours in the rehearsal.

According to rules, Mishra is allowed to take rest for five minutes after every 1 hour. But he is not taking the rest at present and is and accumulating it so that he can take a bigger break between 3 am to 6am after two days. He is also not allowed to pause for more than 30 second between two sentences.

(This story, first published on March 2, 2014, has been edited on the request of Professor Arvind Mishra, who identified portions as factually incorrect)