An Indian Polar Explorer

Explorer Akshay Nanavati will embark on a 50-day, 1100-km solo expedition to the Geographic South Pole in October

- Murali Menon

Apsley Cherry-Garrard's 1922 book, The Worst Journey in the World, is regarded as a travel classic. The travel memoir, which documented the harrowing time faced 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 isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised." The Oxonian is one of Akshay Nanavati's heroes. In December last year, the 38-year-old Indian-American became one of less than 50 people in the world to successfully ski up the Axel Heiberg glacier in Antarctica. Nanavati and his group flew from Chile to the Union Glacier, in Antarctica, and then on to the Ross Ice Shelf, after which they began skiing for over 42 days to the top of the glacier. The deeply crevassed glacier, which falls over 9,000 feet, has a section called Devil's Ballroom, and was discovered by Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole in 1911, named the glacier after his compatriot and patron of polar exploration.

Born in Mumbai, Nanavati is a former United States Marine, ultra runner, speaker, and author, and is best known for his book Fearvana (2017), which encourages the reader to see fear, stress, and anxiety as allies, and leverage these negative emotions to transform themselves. In the words of the Dalai Lama: "Fearvana inspires us to look beyond our own agonising experiences and find the positive side of our lives."