Shouting from the Summits by Ramachandran Kala;

Author:Ramachandran, Kala; [Kala Ramachandran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4783123
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

EVEREST DREAM

I was still keeping in touch with ‘Everest Magendran’ by telephone and letter. I was getting really depressed. I could strongly sense from my conversation with him that there was no sign that Malaysia would organise another Mount Everest expedition for climbers like me. Securing funds for climbing Mount Everest is also a very difficult task. I tried to do a charity climb called ‘A dollar a step’ to raise funds for AIDS but that ended in failure.

In the meantime, Mum and Dad were pressuring me to settle down soon. I would have turned down marriage proposals even if they came from millionaires. In fact I actually passed on my marriage proposal to my friend who was single. I really wanted a man who would understand, respect and accept me for who I was. I had a marriage proposal from this one guy whose family I knew. We met once and had dinner. I was quite open to talk about my Mount Everest dream. The next day, his mum rejected me, saying I would not be a committed wife for having a family! Even twelve years later, his mum asked my mum if I was still climbing mountains. It is a taboo for Asian girls and women to involve themselves in adventurous activities. Does that mean a woman cannot be a sailor, adventurer or space and galaxy explorer? I was quite disappointed by those remarks!

In the meantime, my younger brother moved to Australia and he could not keep up his mortgage payments. The mortgaging bank was after me, as guarantor, to settle the bills and threatened to blacklist me and to put the house up for auction. My dad and I were really stressed about this.

Climbing Books

I used to go to the National Library in Singapore with my friend Shanti to borrow books of climbing stories. I had to use her library card. I read a lot of books about climbing Everest. I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air many times.

Another book I read, in March 2003, was by Anatoli Boukreev and G Weston Dewalt: The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest. Anatoli Boukreev was my idol. He was a Russian citizen and a resident of Almaty, Kazakhstan. He was considered one of the world’s most successful high-altitude climbers. By spring 1996, he had climbed seven of the most challenging 8000 metre mountains, and all of them without oxygen supplementation.

The ‘eight-thousanders’ are the fourteen mountains whose height is more than 8000 metres (26,247 feet) above sea level. They are all located on the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges. They are the mountains whose summits are in the ‘death zone’. Death zone is the phrase used because it is believed that no human body can acclimatize at 8000 m as the oxygen level is insufficient to sustain human life. The fourteen mountains are Everest (8848 m), K2 (8611 m), Kangchenjunga (8586 m), Lhotse (8516 m), Makalu (8485 m), Cho Oyu (8201 m), Dhaulagiri I (8167 m), Manaslu (8163 m), Nanga Parbat

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