Asthmatic Bengal mountaineer attempts to complete explorer’s ‘grand slam’
KOLKATA: In March 2016, when his oxygen mask malfunctioned barely 15 minutes away from Mount Everest’s summit, leaving him gasping for breath for almost 30 minutes, the childhood horror of asthma attacks returned to haunt him.
That was the first time he was not carrying his inhalers during an expedition. Luckily, the oxygen mask started functioning on its own. After the successful climb, Satyarup Siddhanta came back with the belief than he had conquered asthma as well.
On Thursday, the 34-yearold techie, having scaled highest peaks in six continents, left Kolkata for Antarctica on a two-month expedition. He hopes to scale Mt Vinson around December 13-14 and then start for South Pole for skiing the last degree. “It will be a superhuman feat for an asthmatic to scale the seven summits. Climbing Mt Everest for an asthmatic is itself considered a rare feat,” said Rudra Prasad Halder, who scaled Everest in 2016.
Apart from Mt Everest, Siddhanta scaled Mt Aconcagua in South America, Mt Denali in North America, Mt Elbrus and Mont Blanc in Europe, Mt Kilimanjaro in Africa and Carstensz Pyramid and Mt Kosciuszko in Oceania. Reaching the highest peaks in each continent and North and South Pole is considered an explorer’s ‘grand slam’. He’ll reach Chile in early January. There, he aims to climb Ojos del Salado, the world’s highest active volcano, probably as only the second Indian after Malli Mastan Babu. He plans to finish the trip with an ascent to mountain Tres Cruces to pay tribute to Babu, the first south Asian to climb Seven Summits (2006).
The turning point for Siddhanta was 2001, his first year in college.
He started breathing exercise and joined swimming. By 2008, he would rarely require the inhaler.
That year, when his colleagues revealed their plan of trekking Parvathamalai in Tamil Nadu, Siddhanta hid from them that he was an asthma patient and joined in. After a basic mountaineering course in Darjeeling in 2011, his journey for Seven Summits started in 2012 with a successful climb of Kilimanjaro.