c u on top - satyabrata dam

  The other day while talking to a friend, I am not sure how our conversation turned to polar bears and Arctic. My friend wanted to know if I had any close calls with a polar bear, which we often refer as the most dangerous predator on planet. I have had several, I mumbled, but she insisted if any of them were funny. I wondered, funny for whom, me or the bear! That’s a million dollar question. And then it came to me, a really silly wild encounter on a very commonplace evening, what made it funny for me that I wasn’t even trying anything remotely adventurous or risky. It was just the place and the timing and I happened to be at the right place at the wrong time. Here is the story that I related to my friend.   The year might have been 2008 in the middle of January I found myself in a place that only an insane would venture at that time of the year. No need to explain why, to me it seemed rather natural. The place was the capital of Svalbard, Longyearbyen. The northernmost a...

This is the jolly festive season of Christmas and all things good so let me today tell you how and where I met the grand man in red suit and what happened thereafter. To begin with, I have three distinct links to Santa Claus: (a) Our first names start with identical alphabet (b) Quite like him most of my life I have spent in extreme cold and snow laden places and in Polar Regions (c) We both travel the world spreading joy and cheer and smiles at strange and dark places. To my knowledge he never went to South Pole and here I actually outpace him. All this definitely makes me Santa’s country-cousin if not a direct descendent. Just like any of you, especially when you were a child (and I hope you still are), I have always wondered about the things that Santa is known for. His red suit, elves and reindeers, his gifts, why does he come through the chimney, did he ever fight with his wife, why does he go Ho Ho etc, and above all why is he so fat. So I always knew that if I ever met him I am ...

I am often asked the steepest mountain or face I have ever climbed. This post is the answer. I doubt if I would ever climb anything steeper. No, it has nothing to do with my age or fitness level or my desire to stay alive… the reason is much simpler, more rudimentary. There simply is no steeper mountain face in the world than the West face of Mt Thor. It also ranks among my most technical and intrepid climbs, though at the time it did not appear so. More than half of the ascent had to be aided and I was paired with one of the masters of aid climbing. My buddy and partner in several such crimes, the Ukrainian gymnast, Natalia, or Nat as I called her. Watching her zoom up those mindboggling rocks and thin fissures of ice with the grace of a ballerina and strength of a wild beast, while she accomplished smooth gear placements in invisible cracks without missing a breath I have often wondered if she was the cousin of Spider Man. Now read on. Trying to clip the quickdraw through a red color...