c u on top - satyabrata dam

  While growing up, my mother had imparted to me one of my life’s foremost lessons. She had said: son, do listen to your head but always follow your heart. This battle between heart and head is an ongoing engagement that would never end. And life would offer you enough dilemmas and doubts to keep feeding this battle. The question is not who will win, but who out of the two, would you allow to win. Either is ok, it’s totally up to you. You decide.   In this adventure called life, I have almost always allowed my heart to win, especially during all those moments that have and continue to define my life. My heart never allowed me to follow a charted path, designed by the society and world at large. Though at times my head would nibble and throw caution upon my path, try to logic that my path was pernicious and full of folly, yet my heart would say keep going. And seldom has my heart been wrong, actually never. Even when I had thought that it was but looking back my life I find...

  I have been often asked, what exactly I do in between my climbs. Those periods of lull when I am neither going up or coming down snow covered slopes in some godforsaken corner of the planet upon a mountain that no one has ever heard of.   My stock answer to that would be nothing much in particular, just my usual. In this post let’s look at what’s my ‘usual’.   Superficially whatever I might be engaged in, internally I am always living in the moment, dreaming and focusing upon what I consider essential for my existence and having fun. These are my fundamental mantra for living that I apply pretty much every day, each moment. Over and above I could be climbing a mountain, traveling around the world, conducting a happiness workshop, lecturing at Harvard, writing, appearing on a TV show, serenading vogue cover model, chasing the bad guys, dancing in a music video, boating down the Amazon in search of anacondas, abseiling down a volcano, taking a leap of faith litera...

  Perhaps with the coming of age or far too many adventures, my memory is getting foggier day by day or rather year by year. 2022 came and went into and out of my life just like any of you and though I vaguely recall doing tons of stuff in 4 continents and around a dozen countries the details escape me. Hence this would be a very short post, highlighting only the highlights so to speak.   I do not remember where or with who I was on last New Year’s Day. Though I was surely somewhere in Europe. And I must have been either in the mountains or in august company of beautiful women. On my birthday I was snow shoe hiking with my sister through the hills (I certainly cannot call them mountains) of Austria and Liechtenstein. We made water from snow, drank tea, thanked each other and had a jolly good time. Thereafter I popped over across the Atlantic and did something that I had never done before. A road trip through the US along with a friend, in which I actually did majority of t...