Information Madness

Mountaineering gives outdoor opportunities to a lover of high places. One such lover of high places and mountaineering was Namgyal Wangdi who was born on 29^th May 1914 in Khumbu in Nepal. He was brought up there as a Sherpa who are an ethnic group from a mountainous region of Nepal. Khumbu is near Mount Everest which is known as `Chomolungma’ by the Sherpas and the Tibetans meaning the `Mother Goddess of the Earth’. Wangdi’s family were Buddhists as Buddhism was the traditional religion of the Sherpas.

When he was a young child, his name was changed by the Head Lama of the Rongbuk Monastery to Ngawang Tenzing Norbu which later became Tenzing Norgay Sherpa meaning a `wealthy follower of the tribe in religion’.

Tenzing Norgay Sherpa worked as a high altitude porter in three official British attempts to climb Everest from the Tibetan side in the nineteen thirties. In 1947, he again took part in an unsuccessful attempt of Everest with an Englishman, Earl Denman.

From his early campaigns in 1935, Tenzing Norgay Sherpa came to be called as the `Snow Tiger’. He knew from his early days that his life was not meant for tending Yaks. In his youth, he became a trained climber of excellent standing. When he joined the John Hunt expedition in 1953, he was fifth time successful with the Kiwi climber, Edmund Hillary, to conquer Mount Everest. They managed to withstand torrential storms and icy obstacles to make a successful climb on his birthday in 1953 when he planted the Indian flag on Mount Everest and created history.

Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and Edmund Hillary were the first to reach the world’s highest peak. Before he died on 9^th May 1986 with a massive cerebral haemorrhage in Darjeeling, he was associated with seven subsequent Himalayan expeditions after 1953. He is regarded as the most famous mountain climber in history. Time Magazine hailed him as one of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. In 1953, he received the George Medal from Queen Elizabeth II. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Indian Government in 1959. He is buried in the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, a place which was one of his favourite haunts.

His son, Jamling Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, followed his father’s footsteps and reached the peak of Mount Everest in 1996. During that expedition, he survived the most deadly storm ever recorded at Everest. That storm claimed the lives of nine people in that expedition in the higher levels of the Himalayas. David Breasher’s IMAX film, `Everest’ features Jamling as the star who demonstrates the physical and the mental challenges of Mount Everest in this documentary that is being hailed as the `Everest of documentaries’.