Pakkirappa was 10 years old when he tried his first handful of dirt. It was neither a game nor an accident; it was a strange and incurable disorder.
Today, two decades later, in Karnataka, India, he still does the same thing every day: he eats bricks, stones and mud as if they were his main course. “I can skip meals, but not bricks or mud”, he says himself, without dramatizing it, like someone describing an ordinary routine.
Doctors associate it with pica, a disorder that causes uncontrollable cravings for substances with no nutritional value. Pakkirappa insists that he has never had any side effects and that his teeth are perfectly healthy, capable of biting the hardest stone without breaking. His family tries to get him to give up the habit, but he prefers dirt to chicken. Meanwhile, he travels to other towns to show off his talent, and people pay him just to watch him eat 🧱