Deformity does not deter this mountain climber
Pulkit Vasudha
Ahmedabad, August 21:Born with clubfoot (congenital deformity of the foot usually marked by a curled shape or twisted position of the ankle and heel and toes) in the small town of Viramgaon, 60 kilometres from Ahmedabad, Bhupesh Modi does not know what it is to walk without a limp. The handicap may have earned the laughter of his classmates, while he hobbled meekly in special shoes as a young boy, but his resolve to scale new heights and become a mountaineer has remained steadfast. At 46, Modi recently became the first Indian to climb the 15,000-feet-tall Mount Kilimanjaro.
However, the journey, like the mountains, has been anything but easy for it took seven rather painful surgeries in the first 30 years of his life to restructure his feet. In the early 90s, Modi was the first in his group of 40 to peak the Himalayas all the way to the mouth of Beas near Rohtang pass.
In 1998, Modi found himself battling numbing temperatures on his way to Jungfrau peak (13,642 feet) in the Alps. Five years later, the determined mountaineer conquered the Grossglockner peaks, the highest in Austria. The latest mountain in his bounty is Kilimanjaro, where he came face to face with death in a freak accident.
Shuffling down a rocky patch, Modi’s feet slipped and he fell a steep 25-feet before grabbing hold of a wooden shaft in the bridge below. “As I dangled with one arm and saw the ravine below, I thought I was breathing my last,” says Modi. “By the time someone came to my rescue, an excruciating pain had shot up my dislocated arm. My feet hurt so much from the fall that I could not continue very far.”
Modi’s close brush with death didn’t dampen his spirits and he is already scheduling his next trip to Alaska. “If the plans work out and I get sponsors, I will go mountaineering next year,” he says.
It has never been a cakewalk though. In the Alps, he once had a 70-feet fall while rock-climbing and was saved only because a German couple padded his fall despite suffering serious injuries. A snow bug that bit him in the Himalayas threatened to paralyse him waist down. In countries where English is not spoken, Modi has found the power of the language of silence. “Silent communication is a powerful way to communicate, and it cuts across language barriers to evolve a new spirit of comraderie,” says Modi.
Source: Indian Express