A school trip to rural Nepal when Kumaran Rasappan was 15 years old gave him his first glimpse of Mt Everest, and launched him on a lifelong journey of adventuring that would take him to over 20 mountains, from the wilderness of Kilimanjaro to the frozen glaciers of Sichuan and ultimately to the roof of the world, Mt Everest.

Dr Kumaran Rasappan tells the story of his extraordinary journey from sheltered Singaporean to adventurer, doctor and humanitarian. Along the way, he witnessed death, experienced avalanches, survived earthquakes and made surprising discoveries about the tenacity of the human spirit, the nature of success and failure, and the beauty of different cultures. The biggest lesson that his journey has taught him is that one's success and failure cannot be defined by others. Each one of us has our own mountain to climb.

Kumaran Rasappan is an Associate Consultant with the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the National University Hospital (NUH).

He is the first Singapore doctor to summit Mt Everest, and the first Singaporean to climb the world’s highest peaks for charity, Dr Kumaran won the Singapore Youth Award and the ASEAN Youth Award in 2014 for his achievements.

Kumaran and his wife, Dr Gayathri Devi Nadarajan, return to Nepal annually, leading Singaporean medical students and doctors to provide humanitarian aid to the Sherpas and Nepali villagers whom they have come to call friends.

Juleen Shaw is Managing Editor at Salt&Light. She hails from the newsrooms of Singapore Press Holdings and MediaCorp Publishing and is a veteran journalist. She is also co-author with Belinda Lee of Larger than Life: Celebrating the human spirit.

Dr Kumaran Rasappan tells the story of his extraordinary journey from sheltered Singaporean to adventurer, doctor and humanitarian. Along the way, he witnessed death, experienced avalanches, survived earthquakes and made surprising discoveries about the tenacity of the human spirit, the nature of success and failure, and the beauty of different cultures. The biggest lesson that his journey has taught him is that one's success and failure cannot be defined by others. Each one of us has our own mountain to climb.