Early morning on Wednesday, January 16, 2019, Satyarup Sidhanta summited Mt. Sidley, the highest volcanic peak in Antarctica, and with it the Bengaluru-based engineer became the youngest person in the world to have scaled all the highest volcanic peaks (Seven Volcanic Summits) and mountains (the Seven Summits), across the seven continents.
At the time, his age was 35 years and 262 days old.
Summited | Find me with inReach➜https://t.co/6mZwU49R2W— Satyarup Siddhanta (@SatyarupS) January 16, 2019
From being an asthmatic child…
Sidhanta always identified as a child of the mountains. It began with his fascination for Darjeeling and Sikkim—places that he had visited as a child, while on vacation. However, he also struggled with asthma since his childhood. These asthmatic attacks were often triggered by certain foods like prawns, and kept him from away from physically intensive activities.
However, once he got to college, Sidhanta decided to reduce his dependency on these inhalers and began pushing himself to run and swim, while doing breathing exercises every day. Going against the advice of his doctor-father, he even began eating the very foods that would earlier trigger the attacks, as he felt himself growing stronger. His techniques helped him overcome asthma in four years, claims Sidhanta.
… to beginning an ‘uphill’ #10yearchallenge
While working at an IT firm, his team leader showed him pictures of the Parvathumalai trek in Tamil Nadu. Fascinated, Sidhanta went on to join the Bangalore Mountaineering Club in 2008, and went on his first trek to Skandagiri. Over the weekends to follow, he went on several other treks, slowly gaining the confidence for more strenuous pursuits like mountain climbing.
In 2010, Sidhanta visited the Everest’s base camp, vowing to summit the peak someday. Six years later, he successfully stood on ‘top of the world’.
Summiting the ‘Seven from Seven’
In 2012, Sidhanta summited his first of the world’s seven highest peaks, Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, which is also one of the seven highest volcanic summits in the world.
Ever since, he has climbed at least one of the world’s tallest peaks every year, even managing to conquer two peaks each in the years 2014 and 2017.
He scaled four of the volcanic peaks last year, in 2018, and went on to summit Mt. Sidley in January 2019, breaking Australian mountaineer, Daniel Bull’s world record of being the youngest to summit all the Seven Summits and Seven Volcanic Peaks.
Juggling his lives as an IT engineer and mountaineer
Sidhanta raises the funds he requires to conquer these summits through various fundraising and crowdfunding campaigns. Arguably, these take up a lot of his time, forcing him to quit his full-time job so that he could pursue his ambitious passion. Instead, he works as a consultant on various IT projects.
Tejaswi Subramanian is a senior-sub editor at Qrius.
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