Phu dorji biography of abraham

A time when Everest was uncrowded and unpolluted, when only three expeditions had succeeded in putting men on its summit, when attempts at climbing the peak were an undertaking at the very limits of human endeavour. In , the first Indian climbers stood on top of Everest: nine of them, a record for any expedition till then. It was a team effort: 15 core members of the expedition, and as many climbing sherpas.

We spoke to the last living members of that team, eight men aged 73 to 92, still as excited about their Everest triumph as if they were telling the story for the first time.

Phu Dorji. In the Indo-Pakistan

This is their story. For H. Ahluwalia, now 78, the first of these was in early March, 50 years ago, in A few from this team had been part of the previous Indian attempts, in and Nawang Gombu, a sherpa with the team, had already summited with the first successful American expedition, in On 22 February, the expedition members left Delhi by train to meet with their mammoth porter-sherpa team in Jaynagar, a village in Bihar on the Indo-Nepal border.

For Mohan Singh Kohli, a navy captain and leader of the expedition, it was going to be his third attempt. Kohli, now 83, wrote a book on the expedition titled Nine Atop Everest. He describes Jaynagar as resembling a carnival ground—almost expedition members and porters, and perhaps twice as many curious onlookers gathered around a field.

Here began the job of allocating loads and distributing kits. The sherpa head was Ang Tshering, who had been part of the American expedition. Several of the other sherpas had climbed with the previous Indian expeditions as well.