Well recently, the hot topic of Maharashtra is not the lockdown rules or the heavy rainfall everyone experiences, it’s the incredible travel story of an iron chair that has grabbed the attention of the netizens. Recently, a video went viral on the internet that showed how a metal chair, that’s supposed to be from a small town in Maharashtra was spotted along with some of the furniture in a restaurant, located in the UK. The netizens are surprised and many are marveling at the distance that the metal chair has traveled from Maharashtra.
This 20 second viral video was uploaded by the Cricketer-turned-journalist Sunandan Lele on his social media handle, which showed the foldable metal chair. While he visited Manchester, there he spotted this piece of furniture in an outdoor seating area of a restaurant. It seemed like the chair was made of strong iron. And on the back of the metal chair, it was written the name ‘Balu Lokhande’ in Marathi.
Now if you are wondering how the chair traveled and found its way from Maharashtra to Manchester, well, here’s the story:
According to the reports of News18, this heavy chair was first owned by Balu Lokhande, who is a mandap decorator, from Savlaj. Balu bought the chair at the time when he started his mandap decoration business. Lokhande purchased this heavy metal chair from Hubli, located in Karnataka. Gradually, the demand for these strong iron chairs decreased, and as time went by, customers began to demand plastic chairs. The chair is also heavy, weighing around 13 kilograms, so it was too hard to manage such a heavyweight chair.
Balu Lokhande then decided to sell the chairs for scrap at Rs 10 per kilogram. It was around 15 years ago, chairs were sold in Mumbai. And from Mumbai, it was later bought by a foreign businessman as the businessman considered it as an antique chair.
As per News18 reports, as Balu Lokhande came to know about this by watching the viral video, he had been also contacted by Sunandan Lele. Balu told News18, “I told Lele, too, that it was our chair.” And in addition to this, even today Balu’s company still has some similar heavy metal chairs. Balu Lokhande further told News18, “The grapes of our Savlaj already reached overseas, but who knows how “London Saheb’’ fell in love with our chair,”
This is what left the netizens amazed is how this chair from Maharashtra traveled up to 7,461 km away from its home and reached Manchester. So it was actually that Balu sold it, and It then traveled from Sangli in Maharashtra to Altrincham in Manchester. Talking about the post, Sunandan Lele found this funny and amazing, but also strange. As he posted the video, he captioned it, “Isn’t it weird?” From the moment this video was posted by Sunandan Lele on his official Twitter account, it has gained more than 29k views and also 1,800 likes. Desi netizens and tweeple took it as an example of how Indians in general, and those from Maharashtra in particular, are everywhere.
One Twitter user commented, “Hilarious! In a Manchester cafe, sports journalist @sunandanlele found a chair with the name of a tent contractor from a Maharashtra village painted behind it..”. Another user commented jokingly, “Marathi manus is everywhere! This is awesome, I still wonder who took the chair there with the name ! I just hope it’s not the case where Brits looted another treasure from India!”. While one said “Terrific find!!”, another said, “This is quite strange.”
But in all, this travel story of just a metal chair has caught everyone’s attention right now, as it traveled from Maharashtra to Manchester!
