Tuesday, May 28, 2013

This is grit and determination!

On 21 May, just a trifle before 1100h, history was made when 23 year old Arunima Sinha became the world's first woman amputee to scale Mount Everest. It was her sheer grit, tenacity and determination that led her to those lofty(pun intended) heights!

Because, two years ago, she was battling for life after a gruesome tragedy. A national level volleyball player, she was on her way to Delhi in the Padmavati Express from Lucknow when a set of hooligans tried to rob her. When she had resisted, they threw her out of the train and she fell on the adjacent track only to be run over by an oncoming train. The badly damaged limb had to be amputated. Initially lost and depressed, she collected herself and underwent rigorous training at the mountaineering outfit, the TSAF(Tata Steel Adventure Foundation) headed by Bachendri Pal - the first Indian woman to scale the Everest - to achieve her dream and prove that nothing was impossible!

As a run up to her great feat, she'd scaled the Chamser and the Lungser mountains of Ladakh in 2012. And her achievement comes almost 15 years after the first male amputee, Tom Whittaker from the UK, had conquered the world's highest peak.

A post graduate in Sociology, Arunima comes from a lower middle class family in the Ambedkar Nagar district of UP. She'd lost her father when she was just eight years old and it was her mother, a health worker, who'd brought her up.

My salute to you, young lady. And as we say in naval parlance, 'Bravo Zulu'! May your story of courage spread far and wide to fire the imagination of the coming generations!


Tailpiece.

When someone wondered aloud as to what made people take up arduous tasks like scaling the steep and dangerous Mt Everest, the late American President John F Kennedy seems to have said, "It's because it's there"! 

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