It was in the year 1984. I went to receive him at the Bangalore airport. Used to seeing VIPs at Indian airports being decked in garlands and flanked by sycophants I was a little surprised to see this tall man, walking alone, carrying his own suitcase.

“Sir Edmund, I presume?” I asked as I went up to him and introduced myself. “Pleased to meet you,” he said but would not let me carry his suitcase.

The New Zealand High Commission had reserved a suite for him at the Windsor Manor hotel. We had, from the Indian Institute of Science, invited him to deliver a lecture in the frontier series of lectures by leaders of the frontiers of any discipline.

Cameras flashed the moment we stepped into the hotel. As we entered the suite we were greeted with a big cake which depicted two men climbing the Everest in the icing.

After we had invited him, Sir Edmund had been corresponding with me to give me details of the arrangements for his talk in Bangalore. He was pleased to see that everything was in order.

I realised that a mountaineer has to be meticulous about every detail. While we were having a chat over a cup of tea the phone rang – it was the Director of Bangalore Doordarshan asking me whether Sir Edmund would agree to an interview. I asked Sir Edmund; he agreed. “Please send your cameraman and interviewer,” I told the Director.

“Sir, you would be interviewing him, the Director said. “You must be joking,” I said. “What do I know of mountaineering? I haven’t climbed even an ant-hill in my life.”

“We have no one else here. Why don’t you agree...,' the Director almost pleaded. I agreed, having realised that all I had to do was to get Sir Edmund talking and have the camera focused on him. Everyone would be interested in seeing and hearing him and not me. The interview went off all right.

I remember having asked him to describe his thrill when, as the first man ever setting foot on the tallest peak of the world. “I don’t think I would describe my feelings  as  thrill,” he said.

“We were just as anxious about climbing down as we were of climbing up. Sometimes climbing down is more difficult. In fact I, on our way down, I had fallen into a chasm and had it not been for Tenzing, I would have been buried alive.” I really was impressed by this man’s simplicity and honesty.     

Something that may not be generally known is that Sir Edmund had spent a lot of his time, money and energy in trying to alleviate the hard conditions of the sherpas. He set up schools and hospitals for the sherpas.