​Date: 13th October, 2017
Time: 4.00 pm

Speaker:  Satyarup Siddhanta is a Techie turned Mountaineer who is in the mission to climb the highest mountain of each continent which is popularly known as Climbing the 7 Summits in World Mountaineering. Satyarup has already climbed the highest mountain of 6 continents and is all set to climb the last of the 7 Summits this December - Mt Vinson Massif, the highest mountain of Antarctica. He is also going to ski the last degree to South Pole. And his wanderlust will still continue where he aims at climbing the Highest Active Volcano in the world .. Ojos Del Salado in Chile. 

Abstract :  From an Asthmatic kid to a Mountaineer who is climbing mountains all across the world, the journey is inspiring. In 2008, his team leader came back from a trek and showed him some pictures of the hill they went for. Well those pictures were not of the mighty Himalayas, nor it was of the mighty Andes or Alps, but a small hill in Tamil Nadu! Satyarup got fascinated and his journey started..While the world perceives him winning peaks, he actually is winning his limitations! Satyarup will touch upon the history of Mountaineering, the landscape of world mountaineering, the mountaineers he admires, how it started, the glimpse of his journey through the 6 continents and his interpretation of mountains. ​

Snapshots of the talk

Date: 4th August
Time : 4.00 pm

Talk by Dr. Susmita Mohanty
Spaceship designer, explorer, cross-border space entrepreneur

About Talk:
Being in Antarctica is a mind-bending, life-transforming experience. In the words of Dr. Susmita Mohanty, “It was like meeting someone millions of years old. It changed me forever. It was like being on another planet”. Antarctica is an extraordinary mix of the savage, the sublime and the spiritual.
Susmita will give us a glimpse of what it was like being in Antarctica, not as a scientist, not as a tourist, but as part of an eclectic crew that participated in the 1st cultural expedition to the icy continent. She was invited to participate in the “1st Antarctic [Art] Biennale” along with nearly two-dozen artists from around the world, a smattering of interdisciplinary experts, philosophers, photographers, the press, filmmakers, and divers. The organising team for the Art Biennale was lead by the Russian artist-and-seaman Alexander Ponomarev, co-curator Nadim Samman from Berlin and a fabulous Canadian crew from One Ocean Expeditions that ran the operations onboard the expedition vessel ‘Akademik Sergey Vavilov’.


Venue: Centre For Earth Sciences, IISc, Bangalore
Date: 4th August, 2017
Time: 4.00 pm

​Forming the majority of the Central Asia, the so called Stans (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan) are unique and diverse at the same time. Encompassing many great mountain ranges (Hindu Kush, Pamirs, Kun Luns etc), rivers such as the might Amu Darya and Syr Darya, and a millennia of history stretching from Alexander to Mongols, from Timur to Babur, and then from Great Game to Socialism. Last year we were lucky to travel to four of these and witness many of its stories first hand - be amazed at the monuments of Samarkand, get ourselves lost in the streets of Old Bukhara, find amazing hidden valleys deep inside Pamirs in Tajikistan, stare across the amazing blues of alpine lakes in Kyrgyzstan, cross overland borders from one country to another, and witness the transformation of old Soviet city like Almaty into a modern capitalist era. Join us as we share some of these stories and tit-bits of our journey.

​About Speaker: Anshul Chaurasia is a Business Analyst by profession, but more of a traveler at heart. He has traveled to more than 60 countries, is a certified advance scuba diver with 100+ dives across the world and is always yearning to back in Ladakh which he considers his second home. When in Bangalore, he is either busy reading travelogues and history books or planning his next adventures.