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"The why is not theirs to answer."- Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen When pressed for a reason, men who do these things tend to do one of two things. They either invent one retrospectively, or they refuse the question outright. George Mallory, asked why he wished to climb Everest, gave the most famous refusal of all: Because it’s there. He was not answering the question. He was blocking it forever. I’ve often found myself thinking of Mallory’s answer when people ask me why

Thirteen years ago, while rounding the Cape of Good Hope, I ran into a bit of a storm. It was also the 540th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus. Not that there was any connection. It was merely a coincidence of no practical importance. My immediate concerns were existential which were to remain within the confines of the boat, keep the bow pointing east and the mast pointing at the sky. The storm became part of the voyage, and the voyage became a story. The story is now part of

I celebrated a birthday onboard the Delhi in the Indian Ocean. The good cooks whipped up a lovely cake even as I was in the process of finding my sea legs. On my birthday a couple of years later, in 2009, I found myself in Aden aboard a self-destructing yacht with neither visa nor money, in the company of a renowned radio astronomer, Professor Radhakrishnan, Sir C.V. Raman's son. He spent an hour recounting his encounters with a physicist whose name stubbornly refused to come

Never resurrect a dead year. I learnt it the hard way. I am going to tell you a story from 2013. Two days after passing New Zealand, the Mhadei and I bid farewell to 2012 with the meagre resources I had on board, which were a packet of halwa from DFRL and the other half of a bar of Bourneville that had been saved from Christmas. Six hours into the New Year, we strode across the International Date Line and entered the Western Hemisphere from its west, causing a confusion in da

Back in the day, I was sailing Lasers competitively. They were light, fast boats in a tight, unforgiving fleet, and every detail mattered. In one race, still new to the sport, I found myself ahead of an Olympian. That should not have been possible. It was not better tactics. It wasn't that I was sailing in better winds or currents. It turned out that a tiny piece of plastic, no bigger than a chocolate wrapper, was stuck to his rudder. That was all it took. A few centimetres o

Yesterday marked the birthday of Former President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherji. When I completed my first solo circumnavigation and made landfall in Mumbai, three Indian Air Force helicopters carried out a fly-past overhead. One of them had the President of India onboard. As I berthed my vessel alongside the Gateway of India and marched up its steps, I saw the Hon’ble President waiting with a keen, almost childlike energy. When I saluted and made my report, he returned the

In 2018, when I entered the Indian Ocean in the 32-foot replica I anounced that I was finally in the backyard of the Indian Navy. There, along the eastward track lay a point at the intersectino of a line drawn between Perth and Cape Town, and another dropped south from Kanyakumari, where a scattering of four French Austral Lands lie: Kerguelen, Crozet, Amsterdam and St Paul. It was at this intersection that I, a few weeks after making the cheerful announcement, found myself s

A guaranteed tool for success exists, though not in the way most people imagine. I have searched for such a thing for most of my life, and I doubt anyone can truly promise one. But there is an idea I discovered as a schoolboy that has stayed with me and shaped many of my biggest decisions. It came from a small book I picked up in the 11th grade, Martin Gardner's Mathematical Circus, and it taught me something surprisingly powerful about risk and commitment. He described a sim