Actor-writer Milind Shintre creates a world-record

Picture a

crossword

puzzle which is 60 feet wide and 5 feet tall having 43360 words. Sounds like a task solving it right? Now imagine creating this puzzle which has 133000 squares! Most of you might find it crazy but Pune- based actor-writer

Milind Shintre

has done just that. Moreover, in doing so, he has set a record for creating the world’s largest crossword puzzle (in any language) in the

Limca book of records

.
This puzzle in Marathi is set to test not just your word prowess, but general knowledge too. It has words from 27 categories, including names of capital cities of various countries, phrases and synonyms of Marathi words in other languages such as Hindi or Urdu etc.
“It took me three and half years to set this crossword. I spent almost 14 hours every day just working on the puzzle, with only breaks for my meals in between,” says Shintre, who is known as the writer of the Marathi movie

Tula Shikveen Changlach Dhada

.
The amount of work involved in the quest brought with it challenges which the Prime Time actor had prepared his mind for in advance. “I made no movies in that time span, which led to a financial setback for the family. The long hours I spent in front of the computer affected my physical well-being,” he informs.
In fact, he even suffered from what he calls as ‘system overload’. Stressed from the continuous work, his brain was not able to recognise the letters. “After dinner one day, when I returned to the task at hand, the letters read alien to me. My project was almost 75 per cent complete at that time and I thought my efforts had gone in vain. But I was determined to start over if I had to,” says Shintre. Luckily for him, help from his son helped salvage the situation.
“To my surprise, he could read the letters easily. That was when the doctor asked me to give it a break. I was asked to refrain from reading even the bill boards,” he says.
That was his first break two years into his project. The second one came few months later. This time, his brain could not fathom the meaning of simple words like dost (friend) which are used in common parlance.
While Milind started making crosswords since he was in class V, he says his grandmother was a genius at solving puzzles. “She did not even need to write anything down. She could solve any crossword orally,” he says. In fact, his mother Manorama Shintre was a record holder for creating the largest crossword in Marathi language with 16250 squares. “My son also makes crosswords now,” shares Shintre.

Milind says avoiding duplication of words was a big challenge. For this, he sought help of a specially designed software by his friend Ashutosh Soman, which had an error pop up in case of duplication. “However, this software could not identify the difference between certain grammatical aspects of the Marathi language. I had to change all the words dependent on the duplication, at least twice,” informs Shintre.

Pics: Shashank.Sane@timesgroup.com

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