FIRST MAN ON WORLD'S HIGHEST PEAK

Sherpa Tenzing Norgay of Darjeeling, India, along with Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand became the first human being to set foot on the coveted peak of Mount Everest (8843.4 metres or 29029 feet), the highest peak on earth.

No one knew if the top of Everest could ever be reached until May 29, 1953 when Tenzing and Hillary plodded their way to the summit from their high camp at 28,000 feet. It was the ninth British expedition for Mount Everest, led by John Hunt. This was the expedition's camp #9, 1,000 feet from the summit and situated some 2,000 feet higher than today's highest camp for climbers on the same route. Today, climbers set up only 4 camps on the mountain, because Base Camp is positioned much higher than it was in the early days.

Over a period of nearly twenty years, he had made himself a part of every expedition that set out to put a man on the top of Mt. Everest. He had climbed as a lowly porter and as a respected member of the climbing team. He had accompanied large, confident armies (such as the 1936 and 1953 British Everest Expeditions) on their way to the summit, but he had also gone to the mountain with a solitary climber, Earl Denman, in 1947, on the chance that even this might give him an opportunity to get to the top. By 1953, he had probably spent more time on Mt. Everest than any other human being - and had come closer to its summit. Only months before his successful climb with Edmund Hillary, he and Raymond Lambert of the 1952 Swiss expedition, had come within 1,000 feet of the summit -- the highest point that anyone had reached until then. Unlike most of his fellow Sherpas of the time for whom, by and large, climbing was just a challenging way of making a living, Tenzing desperately wanted to get to the summit of Mt. Everest and devoted most of his life to this goal. "For in my heart," he once said, "I needed to go . . . the pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth."

Tenzing's victory over mount Everest was also a symbolic recognisation for the emerging identity a country which has acquired freedom just a few years back after centuries of domination by foreign rulers.