| NEW
DELHI: A double amputee, an asthmatic, a biker with loads of screws and nails
all over his body on Everest… Discovery Channel has it all in its historic
six-episode series, “Everest: Beyond the Limit.” “They
are all different kinds of realities. Nothing
is cooked in our show,” said Discovery India executive vice president and
MD Deepak Shourie during a media sneak preview of just 20 minutes of the entire
250 hours of footage of the summit in the second deadliest season till date, which
claimed 11 lives in 2006.  The
entire climb from the foothill, through the summit, via Base Camp, Advanced Base
Camp, the “Death Zone” at 26,000 ft, the trauma as each climber’s
body started consuming its own muscles and their minds came to collapse, and the
final orgasmic climb that made all of them realise their own smallness… it
is all there in the series starting May 12.
Shourie
told indiantelevision.com that whereas a normal Discovery hour-long feature would
cost about 100,000 dollars, this project has cost way beyond that. It
was a fitting tribute that Major HPS Ahluwalia, who had summitted in 1965 and
had taken a movie camera to shoot the climb, was the guest of honour, but as he
said, his camera conked off just a few hundred feet from the summit. The
Discovery cameras, 42 years later, were of course a few generations ahead. The
crew used two Digibeta cameras along with six Sherpa cams and six Z 1 cameras
for the shoot, and the team included two high-alt cameramen, two Digibeta crew,
two sound recordists, three directors, two location directors, one Sherpa can
operator and others. Ken
Sauls (USA) and Mark Whetu (New Zealand) reached the summit, and every moment
has been captured in their cameras, along with helmet cameras of the climbers.
In fact, two of the directors, Ed Wardle (UK) and Jen Peedom (Australia) also
reached the “death zone”. So
far as content goes, it is amazing to see a man “with tonnes of courage but
no legs’, make it to the summit and back. That was Mark Inglis, who had lost
both his legs to frostbite in an earlier attempt on Mount Cook, some 24 years
ago. In
one episode, he outfits an old friend, a Sherpa climber named Teelay, who had
also lost both his legs, with prosthetic legs, so he could walk after 20 years.
There
are amazing facts: at Death Zone (26,000 feet) the air has just 30 per cent of
the oxygen than at sea level, and the air is so thin that helicopters cannot fly,
so air evacuation is out of the question. Near
the summit, the mind gets disoriented, digestion stops completely, and the body
starts consuming its own muscle, and red blood corpuscles multiply fast to draw
in more oxygen, and this could lead to cardiac arrest. Close
to the summit, a climber needs to take up to 15 breaths to take a single step
forward, and on the summit day, each climber loses 10,000 to 15,000 calories,
10 to 15 times of what it loses in a single normal day. In
fact, as the series unfolds, it shows the details of how each climber copes, or
fails to cope and are brought down to Base Camp; how a cameraman in a different
team goes down with a severe brain condition that could turn him temporarily insane,
and how on the climb back, one of the team members finds man dying, but has to
leave him behind. There
are emotional moments, and almost at the beginning, the team leader, New Zealander
Russell Brice, who has led 13 earlier teams, breaks down when one of the Sherpa
climbers die, the first ever in the career of Brice. The
six episodes systematically makes the viewer become a part of the climb, an experience
that would perhaps lead all of them to realise that like the climbers, they are
also small, and as Ahuliwalia said, a speck in the universe, something that the
only woman to make it twice to the top of the world, Santosh Yadav also underscored.
But
wait, this is the beginning, for Shourie announced also that there is a second
season on Everest, with a different team and different experiences. | 
