The viral video of a girl drawing 15 portraits at once is not a Guinness World Record.

Claim

Rating

Explanation

Noor Jahan is a village girl in Vijay Nagla, Salarpur of Budaun district in Uttar Pradesh. Recently, a video of hers went viral in social media in which she can be seen painting 15 portraits. Anand Mahindra, the Chairman of the Mahindra group, had also shared the video and offered to provide scholarship to the artist.

How is this even possible?? Clearly she’s a talented artist. But to paint 15 portraits at once is more than art—it’s a miracle! Anyone located near her who can confirm this feat? If valid, she must be encouraged & I’d be pleased to provide a scholarship & other forms of support. pic.twitter.com/5fha3TneJi

— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) October 27, 2022

Anand Mahindra’s tweet prompted many news outlets such as LiveMint, First Post, India Today cover the story.

Various users in social media also shared this video and some with a claim that the artist’s efforts were conferred with Guinness World Record for sketching 15 portraits at once. Some also praised the patriotism of the girl for honoring 15 freedom fighters. Some of the tweets and posts can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

What’s the truth?

We ran a keyword search online and found at that there is no credible news about Noor Jahan getting a Guinness World Record. We also searched in the Guinness website for such a record, but no such record is available.

So, with claims of Guinness record out of the way, we searched for the authenticity of the video. However, we couldn’t verify if these 15 portraits are genuinely painted at the similar fashion as claimed in the video. We were able to find similar videos online such as the one below.

There are various videos with similar claims, and they use variety of tricks ranging from tying pens at different lengths in a stick to straightforward misdirection. Some draw one painting at a time with a similar setup splitting their time to draw other portraits to gain even progress.

A similar video of drawing 4 portraits at once could be seen using similar tricks which can be seen here.

Though we couldn’t verify the integrity of the viral video, we noticed a peculiar thing in these portraits mostly comprising of Freedom Fighters is the portrait of South Indian Actress Anushka Shetty. The poster from Anushka Shetty seems to be the inspiration behind this particular portrait supposedly of Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi.

Conclusion

In our search, we couldn’t verify the authenticity of the video if they were drawn simultaneously. However, the claims of the artist receiving a Guinness World Record is false as no such record is found in the Guinness website.