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The Telegraph, Calcutta - 11 June 2013

But youth trudges on to scale Everest, by Amit Bhelari

"On top of the world. But tired and scared."

This is how Prem Kumar Singh signed off a chat with a friend after coming down to the Mt Everest base camp a couple of days after a successful summit on May 19.

Prem, the 23-year-old youth with roots in Chhapra, has only one dream: the "Seven Summits", as he describes himself in his Twitter account. Since his childhood, Prem — who idolises Reinhold Messner besides Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary — has been chasing the dream of scaling the world's highest peak (8848m) and on May 15, he made the final push from the base camp (5364m).

The economics graduate of Delhi University told The Telegraph: "Of course, the expedition was not easy and you need to have strong will power to climb the height of 8848m. Mountaineering is not very popular in India so I had to cope with every situation — be it arranging funds or acclimatisation with adverse conditions in the Himalayas."

The youth, whose ancestral home is at Manpushaula village under Ishwarpur block, added: "I was confident but to turn my dream into reality I had to do a lot of practice. First, I successfully scaled the Renok (5800m) in Sikkim in 2010 followed by a summit of Deo Tibba (6001m) in Himachal Pradesh. To gain more experience, I scaled Mt Satopanth (7075m) in Uttarakhand."

About the Everest expedition, Prem, who completed his Class X from Sian Model School, Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, before moving on to Gurgaon where his parents are settled, said: "It was a joint expedition in which two other mountaineers — Stone Lee from Taiwan and Leila from Russia — took part. On March 23, we started our expedition from Lukla in Nepal."

About the summit, Prem — guided by Rinjin Sherpa all along — said: "I left the base camp on May 15 for the final summit and reached the top at 7.10am on May 19. I left camp 3 for camp 4 at 8am on May 18 and after crossing the critical Yellow Band and Geneva Spur, I reached camp 4 at 2pm — the final rest before summit. From there, I left for the summit attempt in bitter cold using headlamps around 8pm. I crossed the infamous Balcony, Hillary Step and Last Ridge to reach the peak at 7.10am. I stayed there for 15 minutes, as I wanted to feel the surrounding in that strong chilly wind."

Prem took 17 hours to return to camp 4 at 1pm on May 19. "Upon return to camp 4, we had planned to leave for camp 4 of Mt Lhotse (8516m) and climb it as well, doing the world's highest traverse and setting a world speed record in the process. But when I reached the Lhotse camp 4, I found my fellow climber Lee dead in the tent. He had died there of extreme exhaustion, so the plan to the Mt Lhotse was abandoned to bring Lee's body down. I was really disheartened by the incident and I came back to the base camp with a plan to return there next year," said Prem, who still considers himself an "amateur mountaineer."