c u on top - satyabrata dam

I strongly recommend that you find / discover / create a truly IMPOSSIBLE dream for yourself. Impossible (yes) but not improbable. An impossible dream is possible to pursue but impossible to realize and achieve. While an improbable dream does not have any probability therefore is not even a source of motivation.   My impossible dream took shape when at the age of 10 I climbed my first major Himalayan peak. And it was: to travel the world and climb every mountain. I was young, naïve, completely ignorant to the vast scale and impossibility of my dream. There’s no way on earth any human could climb every mountain in the world or travel the complete world. Achievable perhaps in a thousand life time, but absolutely impossible in one. Today at 57 I still have the same dream: to travel the world and climb every mountain. After all it was and is still an impossible dream so I will never achieve it in totality and this dream will last his life time for sure.   Whereas if I had ...

  Human settlements including cities, towns, villages and even countries have acquired names that are funny, quirky, at times downright offending, weird and even unpronounceable. Why these names were picked up by the city planners or the town council is a subject worthy of contemplation. The most common being that they wanted an uncommon name for their resident locality and with hope that merely an odd name would attract tourists. Alas, most such places are also among the least visited. As I traveled around the world in search of mountains to climb, I did visit many such places with uncommon names.   Here for the sake of this list and my English speaking readers I have only mentioned English sounding names, which has an English meaning (barring one exception that I couldn’t resist with good reason as you would discover). Therefore many weird names in local vernacular language got left out, for example Kala Kutta in India, which in English transliterates to Black Dog. Or...

People often ask me what have been my worst moments in life, when I almost died, or felt that I wouldn’t get back alive, when everything seemed hopeless and totally lost. My answer normally is that despite anything nothing is ever hopeless. As long as I have my last breathe within me even if I am totally lost and on the verge of dying. There is hope as long as there is life. And then I embellish it with saying that there are no worst or best moments in life; it all depends on which side of the fence you are looking at it from that decides if it was worst or best; albeit it was certainly a MOMENT. Whereas it is said that you should count your life by how many moments that took your breath away, I normally count them by how many mistakes I made and therefore learnt something out of it and in my case my mistakes are always goofy since I laugh about them upon my own silly attitude. Oxford dictionary defines goofy – ludicrous or foolish; and mistake – a wrong action attributable to ...

Your Russian Guide in Kremlin I just returned from a madcap adventure in Russia with a group of friends to visit the highest summit of Europe – Elbrus in the Caucasus. This post is not about this climb. I know or knew Russia and Russians well and a smattering of the language that had taken me from the high volcanic plateau’s of Kamchatka to the Baltic or Finnish Lapland and from the frozen shores of Laptev Sea (Northernmost tips of Siberia) to the breezy Caspian, often pursued or accompanied by stern non-smiling men and women in uniform whose purpose was to ensure I did or came to no harm. So rushing through the Russian Tundra aboard the Trans-Siberian Rail or reindeer-sleding towards the North Pole, I had always been amazed and impressed with the Russian diversity and the people’s tenacity over so much anarchy and butchery. My first trip to Russia was more than 20 years back when KGB ruled that world and the mere mention of Lubyanka could make any lion-hearted feel dizzy; ...