Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 book, The Worst Chase in the World, is believed to be a journey classic. The journey memoir, which documented the harrowing time confronted by Robert Falcon Scott’s disastrous Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole — Cherry-Garrard was a member— begins with the following line: “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most remoted system of getting a sinful time which has been devised.”
The Oxonian is one in every of Akshay Nanavati’s heroes. In December final yr, the 38-yr-obsolete Indian-American grew to turn into one in every of no longer up to 50 of us on this planet to efficiently ski up the Axel Heiberg glacier in Antarctica. Nanavati and his team flew from Chile to the Union Glacier, in Antarctica, and then on to the Ross Ice Shelf, after which they started skiing for over 42 days to the head of the glacier. The deeply crevassed glacier, which falls over 9,000 toes, has a bit known as Satan’s Ballroom, and was chanced on by Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. Amundsen, the first particular person to achieve the South Pole in 1911, named the glacier after his compatriot and patron of polar exploration.
Born in Mumbai, Nanavati is a feeble United States Marine, ultra runner, speaker, and creator, and is handiest known for his book Fearvana (2017), which encourages the reader to behold ache, stress, and fright as allies, and leverage these detrimental emotions to transform themselves.
Within the words of the Dalai Lama: “Fearvana conjures up us to glimpse previous our comprise agonising experiences and fetch the optimistic aspect of our lives.” Nanavati’s comprise memoir is an intelligent one. He moved to the united states when he was 13, and slid right into a lifetime of drug and alcohol addiction. Then, he watched the movie Sad Hawk Down (2001), and made up our minds he wished to be a Marine. “I used to be drained of my egocentric, worthless existence. I needed to develop something more, lend a hand in an institution the attach the right of the team matters bigger than particular person well-being,” says Nanavati.
He enlisted in the united states Marine Corps, no topic tormented by thalassaemia and ignoring his medical doctors’ warning that he might possibly no longer live to philosophize the tale boot camp. While in the Marines, Nanavati says he sought for varied ways to confront his comprise fears. “I had led a sheltered existence, but now I needed to search out the perimeters of my fears. I went hiking, rock hiking, and caving — nature form of grew to turn into my playground. Being a Marine taught me the extraordinary thing about struggling and what we are able to faucet into when we learn to transcend it.”
In 2007, Nanavati was deployed as an infantry noncommissioned officer to Iraq, the attach one in every of his jobs was to creep in entrance of automobile convoys and alert them relating to the conceivable presence of IEDs. When Nanavati returned to The United States after spending seven months in Iraq, he struggled to adjust to a now not recent existence. He started ingesting again and was identified with Post-worrying Stress Dysfunction (PTSD) and depression. In 2013, he says he came shut to slitting his wrists. “That was the turning level, a location off for switch. I started working on a boulevard procedure to rating out of the abyss,” says Nanavati, who started writing the book after attending a seminar by Jack Canfield, the American motivational speaker and co-creator of the handiest-selling Hen Soup for the Soul series. “I asked him what he would have executed otherwise if he had a massive gamble to return in his profession? And he said, ‘I’d have written my book sooner.’ That’s when I knew that I needed to allotment my transformative abilities with the area, recede something on the abet of that transcends you.”
In Fearvana, Akshay Nanavati mixes analysis in neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, and his existence experiences. The elementary ethos of his philosophy is that ache is no longer the antithesis of Nirvana. Pretty, it’s the access uncover it. “We demonise ache, struggling, fight, stress, fright — but I don’t peep them as detrimental emotions. Fearvana is designed to lend a hand of us transcend their fears and struggling and access bliss.” Since his return from Iraq and subsequent resurrection, so that you just might talk about, Nanavati has undertaken a ski crossing of the massive Greenland Ice Cap, climbed 20-thousanders in the Nepal and Indian Himalayas, executed a 157-mile bustle across Liberia to lift cash for charity, and took part in week-long polar expeditions in Norway. His expeditions are partly funded by his talking assignments and sponsors.
In August 2022, Nanavati is scheduled to head to Iceland; October will peep him ski across the Patagonian Ice Cap; and in November, he’ll embark on a 50-day, 1100-km solo expedition via the Hercules Inlet, which lies on the edge of the Antarctic continent, to the Geographic South Pole. If winning, Nanavati will turn into the first Indian-born particular person to boot to the first American to develop the feat. He additionally says that he has chanced on his metier in polar exploration — of the solo kind. “Mountaineering is more no longer easy any day and more dynamic— but there might be an additional area that incorporates being solo, psychologically and spiritually, in the polar areas.
In Antarctica, specifically, you are going to be one in every of the most remoted human beings on the face of the planet, and you would like to confront the depths of that solitude while skiing via empty white nothingness day after day after day. It’s some distance more struggling,” says Nanavati. He’s fleet to elaborate that he is no longer, as several Catholic saints of yore, a masochist. “Suffering is the methodology but no longer the motive for why I lumber,” he says. “You are opening a doorway into the human soul the attach you might possibly possibly presumably fetch treasures, but handiest in the occasion you battle the dragon.”