During our younger days some of the quiz questions ran thus: Who has won the Formula 1 World Championship twice? or Which mountaineer has scaled Mount Everest twice? The answer to the first question was Ayrton Senna who won the Formula 1 World Championship in 1988 and 1990 and actually went on to win the Championship for the third time in 1991 but met with a fatal crash in 1994. The answer to the second question was Nawang Gombu Sherpa.

The 29,035 feet (8,850 metres), the highest point on planet Earth, was scaled successfully for the first time by Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on 29 May 1953. Nawang Gombu became the youngest Sherpa to reach 26,000 feet and scaled Everest for the first time in 1963 and again two years later.

However, in the field of Formula 1 racing, Ayrton Senna’s glorious achievement has been put to shade by racers like Michael Schumaker and Lewis Hamilton. When I attended the Basic Mountaineering Course, way back in November 1981, at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling, Nawang Gombu who was one of our instructors was a hero to be worshipped by every mountaineering enthusiast. However, since then, several sherpas have scaled the world’s highest mountain on more than ten occasions. Leading the pack with 30 successful summits is 54-year-old Kami Rita Sherpa.

Tenzing was born in Thame, a small village in the Solukhumbu district of Nepal. Twenty seven years later, on 17 January, the same village saw the birth of Kami Rita. The young Kami wanted to be a monk but he soon realised that this was not going to be the way of his future life. He became a porter for the mountaineers and thus began his mountaineering career.

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