While real life hero and heroines rarely find a proper place in our media, we have a strange fascination in making pygmies on the political stage appear larger than life in newspapers/TV channels/blogs.
Here I am talking about a New Zealander and an American woman who have become legends in their lifetime.
This week, a middle-aged man from New Zealand called Mark Inglis painfully hauled himself up the last few feet to the summit of Mount Everest, reports The Independent.
“Nothing so unusual in that — after all, climbing Everest has become so popular its slopes are often crowded, and more than 100 people have scaled the mountain already this year. Except Inglis is different: he has no legs.
Inglis, who lost both his legs to frostbite more than 20 years ago, is the first double amputee to reach the top of Everest. On Monday night he telephoned his wife, Anne, in their New Zealand home from the 29,035-foot summit to let her know he had made it safely.
During his climb, Inglis has been raising funds to provide artificial legs for disabled Tibetans, who live under the shadow of Everest. He made his own ascent on carbon fibre artificial legs specially adapted for climbing.
At one point, one of them snapped in a fall at 21,000 feet, and Inglis had to make running repairs on the mountainside before he could struggle back to his fellow climbers and rebuild it with spare parts.”
However, Inglis’ achievement was not without controversy. The triumph of the mountaineer Mark has been soured by the news he left a dying climber to his fate.
Forty-nine climbers including 31 Nepalese high altitude porters and guides scaled the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, on Tuesday and Wednesday (may 23-24), the Nepalese Tourism Ministry said.
Meanwhile a 70-year-old Japanese climber believed to be the oldest man to scale Everest marked the achievement by leaving a photograph of his dog on the summit, he told reporters on Tuesday.
Takao Arayama, aged 70 years and 225 days when he topped the world’s highest mountain last Wednesday, beat the record held by a fellow countryman by just three days.
And here is the story of the intrepid American woman who has made Nepal her home. “Defying conventions of her era, Elizabeth Hawley, 83, from American mid-west has spent more than four decades in Nepal chronicling Himalayan expedition climbing. One of the most important figures in Himalayan climbing may be someone who has never been to Everest Base Camp, and is not a climber.
In 1960, this young American woman moved to Nepal as a reporter for Time Inc. Initially sending home political dispatches from the kingdom, it wasn’t long before Hawley’s pen found its niche: mountaineering in the world’s highest places.
She quickly became part of the Kathmandu scene, socializing regularly with an eclectic group of adventurers, climbers, royalty, politicians and entrepreneurs. Hawley is still in Kathmandu today and has been the unofficial chronicler of every detail of every expedition mounted from Nepal in the Himalaya for more than four decades.
Her biography has been writen by Bernadette McDonald, Vice President, Mountain Culture at the Banff Centre and Director of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. She is the co-editor of Voices From the Summit: The World’s Great Mountaineers on the Future of Climbing, and other titles.”
Elizabeth Hawley, born in Chicago in 1923, historian by training and reporter by vocation, long-term resident of Kathmandu, has devoted herself since 1962 to recording mountaineering activities in the Nepal Himalaya. “Her detailed and accurate reports are based on personal interviews with members of every climbing expedition. Her work has resulted in the production of a unique record of the story of climbing in Nepal.
“The wealth of data contained in her records represents an authentic and valuable information source for climbers wishing to plan future mountaineering expeditions to the Nepal Himalaya. Apart from her work as a journalist, Elizabeth Hawley is engaged in the affairs of the Himalayan Trust, an aid organization founded by Sir Edmund Hillary, which supports medical, educational, cultural, and reforestation projects in the Solu-Khumbu district situated SW of Mount Everest.”
Swaraaj Chauhan describes his two-decade-long stint as a full-time journalist as eventful, purposeful, and full of joy and excitement. In 1993 he could foresee a different work culture appearing on the horizon, and decided to devote full time to teaching journalism (also, partly, with a desire to give back to the community from where he had enriched himself so much.)
Alongside, he worked for about a year in 1993 for the US State Department’s SPAN magazine, a nearly five-decade-old art and culture monthly magazine promoting US-India relations. It gave him an excellent opportunity to learn about things American, plus the pleasure of playing tennis in the lavish American embassy compound in the heart of New Delhi.
In !995 he joined WWF-India as a full-time media and environment education consultant and worked there for five years travelling a great deal, including to Husum in Germany as a part of the international team to formulate WWF’s Eco-tourism policy.
He taught journalism to honors students in a college affiliated to the University of Delhi, as also at the prestigious Indian Institute of Mass Communication where he lectured on “Development Journalism” to mid-career journalists/Information officers from the SAARC, African, East European and Latin American countries, for eight years.
In 2004 the BBC World Service Trust (BBC WST) selected him as a Trainer/Mentor for India under a European Union project. In 2008/09 He completed another European Union-funded project for the BBC WST related to Disaster Management and media coverage in two eastern States in India — West Bengal and Orissa.
Last year, he spent a couple of months in Australia and enjoyed trekking, and also taught for a while at the University of South Australia.
Recently, he was appointed as a Member of the Board of Studies at Chitkara University in Chandigarh, a beautiful city in North India designed by the famous Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier. He also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students there.
He loves trekking, especially in the hills, and never misses an opportunity to play a game of tennis. The Western and Indian classical music are always within his reach for instant relaxation.
And last, but not least, is his firm belief in the power of the positive thought to heal oneself and others.