Photos: Guts and glory in Aditya Gupta’s book “7 Lessons From Everest”
On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first to summit Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. On
On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first to summit Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. On the 68th anniversary of their feat, a look at the ultimate climb with pictures and a first-hand account from Aditya Gupta’s photobook 7 Lessons From Everest, comprising pictures shot during Gupta’s climb in 2019.
View from the South Summit at 8750m, 2 hours to summit. The Cornice Traverse at Mt Everest. Does not matter if you are totally exhausted, dehydrated, freezing, hypoxic, hungry … or anything worse. You must remain super alert, and in top performance mode. Or you will pay. With your life! That’s the deal. That’s what you sign up for when you sign up for a shot at reaching the “top of this world”. This is pretty much the last hurdle before you may kiss the summit. One look at it sends a sharp shiver down your spine before you piece back your courage together and fight on. Go for it. Glory beckons – but demands its price!(Aditya Gupta)
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Dawn that day was a special gift. Not only did it offer some “once in several generations” views but the optimistic excitement about the summit being within striking distance. This is a majestic view of Mt Makalu, one of the 14 peaks higher than 8000m in the world. We had been going for about 10 hours by this time and I don’t know what was energizing me, but it felt “comfortable” in the given context. I got this quick shot from just under the South Summit. The winds were calm the sky was clear and Sagarmatha seemed like a friendly planet. I wish there was the time and opportunity to absorb these moments while on the climb, but out there it is just the tough ask of putting one foot ahead of the other, 5 to 7 gasps at a time.(Aditya Gupta)
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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
