Soliloquy of a Wandering Pilgrim

It has taken me six (though very short) web logs to write something close to a prologue about my plans to undertake a long journey in Africa. Through them I have also tried to justify why I have this pathological need to experience Africa on a bicycle, alone. It was always in there, in me, this bohemian ‘me’, always wanting, craving to wander. And partly it is Mr. Tilman to blame, I guess. My heart is full of excitement. I am excited in anticipation of the vastness of the unknown factors that lay ahead. Factors that will govern and dictate the fate of my journey. Factors that I cannot possibly imagine may be! And that is what making me alive, again. In this episode I would like to mention my friends without whom my dream for this African journey would not have turned into a reality. People without whose support the stalemate of the mundane would have carried on and on. First of all, it is, Mr. Sabyasachi Talukdar, the CEO and Editor, of Uttarbanga Sambad ( www.uttarbangasambad.c

A break from ‘my’ known and ‘my’ obvious “ ...does your enthusiasm hold good only for mountaineering?’ ‘By and large I do everything with enthusiasm, as long as it doesn’t concern bureaucracy, which I hate like the plague.’ Is there another climb to come?’ ‘I would like to travel to Tibet, to South America, I would like to experience so many countries, get to know so many areas..." The above conversation takes place somewhere in Cologne, Germany in 1979. Questions asked by anonymous public, answers given by none other than Reinhold Messner. (Source: Crystal Horizon, Reinhold Messner, p.60) Today mountaineering is the only activity I can put to practice and use it to earn bread for my family. But it is not just livelihood. It was never just about work. I am passionate about it. That is why I had left a job in the Pharmaceutical Industry in the first place. 8 hectic years in pharmaceutical marketing was enough to suffocate and slow poison me. I had quit without even

When mountains become a mundane monotony In the last episode of my blog (Prologue to Africa Part IV: Blanks on the map) I had talked about the exploratory trips that I had undertaken in 2011. But surely there were more to 2011 than just those three. In July 2011, my old friend Martin Muecke and I dreamt of climbing Mount Satopanth (7075m). Michael Kohler joined in and the team became threesome. Together with our Sherpa support team we were only 6 people ( Martin, Michael, Thendup, Lakpa, Mingma and myself) trying to get our way up the summit of Satopanth in a lightweight style and everything went well till the summit day. After pitching our base camp in Vasuki Tal; we had set up an ABC and two further and higher camps putting us strategically located for the summit bid. On the summit day heavy smog engulfed us and the forecast ahead was of long, heavy snow days. We decided to turn back within 100m of the summit with not so happy faces. Sato