c u on top - satyabrata dam

Any climber, however intrepid, insane and outrageous he or she may be who says has never felt fear of death is bullshitting. On return while laying our aching limbs next to a lumbering fire with a pint in our hand we may be pouring out boisterous songs and ‘devil-may-care’ attitude, but mark my words friends, up there when the elements were trying their best to nip our lives, we had forgotten all our cockiness and had only a silent prayer on your lips and thought only of surviving through the day and through the moment. It’s not so much as the fear of death as the familiar world of the living that we don’t wish to give up yet. Do we ever actually fail or it is the pre-eminence of a failure that puts us in a quandary! Why is it that we can walk comfortably on a thin line of 6 inch in width on ground, without ever stepping out of it, whereas put a similar sized and equally sturdy plank 10 ft above ground and we would perhaps not find it that easy. Take that plank 100 ft up and perhaps on...

People say that I am courageous and I do things that need courage, but honestly I have never been consciously courageous, or felt courage coursing through my veins. In fact I am not really sure what courage means or how does it feel to be courageous. I do things that challenges me, excites me, makes me feel alive, keeps me on and off the edge. Whatever fuels my passion and love for the outdoors is what I do. But then what about fear! Now that’s something I can quite correlate to. I have felt fear, I know how your stomach knots and throat dries up when fear runs through your heart and freezes your blood. Absence of courage is not fear and likewise absence of fear is not courage. Courage (if there indeed is a thing like that) is a fickle friend and is a weak ally since it flees so easily when faced with situations and adversaries. But look at fear, it never deserts you, it never abandons you, it stays and fear is not afraid of anything at all. Living constantly under the shadow and in th...

There’s no smile Without tear No courage Without fear There’s no darkness Without light No mirth Without plight There’s no now Without a was No would be Without a pause There’s no god Without belief No religion Without relief There’s no love Without pain No thoughts Without brain There’s no rose Without thorn No morsel Without its corn There’s no mountain Without snow No dark nights Without its glow There’s no advance Without retreat No victory Without defeat There’s no death Without life No peace Without strife There’s no one strong Without being weak No one’s bold Without being meek There’s no you There’s no me It’s not life If it’s not we

Should we be scared to fail? What is that we are scared of about failing? And before that we must understand when do we really fail? How do you define failure? Is it objective or subjective? Many questions and there are zillions of documents and research data on this quest. Psychologists make mega-bucks trying to cheer people who conceive themselves as failures. What if these people are not really ‘failures’! They could as well be achievers on a different scale. From a rock climber’s point of view; failure on 5.9 could be a success on 5.8 or 5.7 and in my climbing world reaching the summit is not always the sole criteria for success. Even when we don’t reach the summit it could be a success; as I am wont to say that no matter where you reach, it is still a summit, ‘your’ summit. Failure can and does evoke different emotions within different individuals, at different times under differing circumstances. I could feel disappointed or more encouraged; it could lead to my giving up or redou...