I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

From Howl – for Carl Solomon by Allen Ginsberg

I realise I haven’t written anything for a while. In fact I have, but I haven’t shared it. I have been very busy. All this will come. Soon.

In the meantime…

Earlier this week I just arrived back to London Heathrow from my brother’s wedding in India and just made my connecting flight to Manchester with Virgin’s new Little Red domestic airline.

I settled into the leather seat and a well-dressed but tired looking late middle aged couple got onto the plane and sat in my row. They were carrying what appeared to be wrapped prints and handled them with a delicate importance. I had seen this from having a sister who is an artist and handles her own work in the same way.

I enquired. I couldn’t help myself. Their faces were tired not just by the exhaustion of long-haul travel but with a sadness of life and yet also emanated an undefeated resolution. A proud mother, Judith, explained they had come from their son’s photography exhibition in New York. My ears pricked. I loved photography but more so the stories behind photos.

The story went on… their son had been a photojournalist and war photographer who had died in a war. If you don’t know about Tim Hetherington, you should. I was sat, by chance, with his parents – two years after his death. He died in Libya in 2011, a celebrated hero, in the fallen city of Misrata.

Emphasis in tabloid war coverage these days falls on Soldiers, women and children – those shown in war by the photos taken by people like Tim. But as the ‘Animals of war’ statue near to Speaker’s Corner of London’s Hyde Park reminds me, war corrupts everyone’s lives, whoever or whatever you are. It soaks, floods, infects and saturates every crevice of society.

Next time you open a free newspaper on your morning commute, divert your eyes from the newsprint about the most recent conflict, and instead let the photo tell you its story – not only what is shown, but what is not. Try to imagine standing in the photographer’s shoes. It may be the last thing you ever see.

The last photograph taken of Tim Hetherington, just hours before his death in Libya was taken by Chris Hondros who was also killed in the same mortar attack.

Learning to be a ‘photographer’ myself I have been very fortunate to have already been supported by Sigma, Hasselblad and I have a strong appreciation for masters and colleagues who make it their life time career in an unforgiving unpredictable tirade of danger to seek and inspire others by capturing the honest heartbeat of the world and its stories they capture, no matter how irregular or life-threatening the rhythm.

I love stories and especially those that were caught by Tim Hetherington. Photojournalism is a skill but more so, as a doctor seeing many patients every single day, I can appreciate how it is to tease out a true to life story. It takes a certain type of person to be able to gain a person’s trust and not dishonour that. It quite similar to making a diagnosis. First you have to listen. If you can’t or don’t listen, you’ll probably miss it. Its involves getting dirty in the hovel’s mud of life.

Tim didn’t mind and his accolades reflect this- he won world press photo of the year for this photo:

That wasn’t all – he co-directed the documentary film ‘Restrepo’ (2010) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2011.

Having worked my own way through the world’s problems in the last years travelling country to country restlessly chasing science and a greater meaning to life around the world I can appreciate how hectic Tim’s life has been and the sacrifice’s he will have to have made.

This isn’t disaster tourism.

I got off the flight and bundled into my waiting father’s car. What a flight indeed. The strange ways the world works… indeed I will recommend flying Virgin’s new airline. What a journey I had been taken on in the least likely route – London to Manchester. As I joked with Judith, it beats the lonely 3 and a half hour slog up the M1 motorway to the hum of Radio 4.

Something had re-ignited. An old engine that had been buried in the Alaskan winter had been dug-up and revived – my heart was shocked into rhythm by a defibrillator charged by someone else’s life path.

A few months ago I had re-read a book called the Bang Bang Club. I first came across it from a university friend in 2002. It reminded me that wars don’t just kill you. Covering them can do, but more so you can be worn down and destroyed by the sadness of life and that includes what you may capture. Using Sir David Attenborough’s words he once used to describe Mount Roraima (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World) bordering Venezuela, he described such imagery as ‘haunting your imagination’.

Bang Bang Club member and war photographer Kevin Carter fled a war only to arrive in Sudan to take this photo during the famine which won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for feature photography 1993:

The real tragedy of the photo was missed. Instead the viewers had been distracted by instead finding themselves having to deal with the ethics of the photo. How could someone stand over a starving child and take a photo?

War photography has its many victims. In 1994, consumed by guilt, Kevin Carter aged 33 took his own life leaving a simple explanation:

I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners …”

War photography can consume the human mind. It takes lives with choice and without.

A few days later I walked out having completed an informal interview… to work somewhere dangerous and somewhere where you can never easily say that you’ll come out of alive. The thing is, I had thought about it for years so it just sat right like being at the end of a good meal, if a little uneasy not knowing if you have eaten too much, feeling sick with undeniable satisfaction. Deep down I know if its something you have to do, then you should do it. And thats what makes it doable. You can’t hide who you are.

Tim’s life and offering to the world, reminds me there is never any shame and should never be any tragedy perceived in living that, only in not living that.

If living in 3 months of pitch black Antarctic darkness and complete isolation at the end of the world for the past year teaches you anything, it strips away every single layer until you’re staring back at your own soul and then you know who you really are. Like an old tribe’s ritual rite of passage, it separates and turns the boys into men and sometimes, if you can’t take the heat like one of my colleagues found, the men into boys. Wherever you are, documenting a war zone or lasting out the worst winter in the world, you dig deep and find reserves you never realise you have. You strike oil not knowing it was there. You then have gained a resilience to life that will see you sail through being held up at gunpoint. With a little luck, you make it out alive, albeit as a changed man (or boy).

If Tim Hetherington is in heaven, I hope its a peaceful place. Otherwise, I hope he took his camera.

For more information about Tim Hetherington and his remarkable life please see:

www.timhetherington.org

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/tim-hetheringtons-legacy-a-mothers-perspective-of-her-war-photographer-son/2012/04/11/gIQAtqqxAT_blog.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hetherington…

Dr Alexander Kumar, 29, of the John Radcliffe Hospital, has been selected as the trip doctor for two voyages retracing Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antartic exploits.

Yesterday he left on a two-month journey called the Shackleton Epic, an attempt to become the first to authentically re-enact the explorer’s 800 nautical mile Southern Ocean journey and expedition over the continent’s rugged interior.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/team-sets-out-to-replicate-shackletons-epic-journey-8436009.html…

I am extremely honoured to have been invited to give these talks in the Attenborough Studio

What do our bodies and minds go through during space travel? Without using rockets there is no way to find out, unless we find a place on Earth that is similar enough to the conditions of outer space. The one location that holds the key to this mystery is Antarctica. With its cold, dark and lonely winters, it is an ideal place for simulating space travel. Join us as we meet a medical scientist who has spent the last year in Antarctica testing the limits of human endurance to discover more about what a trip to Mars might really be like.…

BBC Radio 4 – Material World Interview…

Enduring the worst winter in the world

Nine months in Antarctica braving minus 80 C temperatures is one thing. It’s the three months of darkness that really do you in

Click here to read the article on the CNN website

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For those who can read spanish, click on the image below to open the PDF

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In fact I used to live in Nepal and it was very happy to share my very fond memories of my time there – I have been three times and look forward to visiting again.

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Click on the image to download the full document

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A few last tricks are played on you as you try to leave Antarctica. Almost as a last jest to remind you that nature is in control, the continent threw up several delays to our planned departure. For a while, it was a groundhog day of sorts with flights being planned and then canceled because of bad weather.

After some time, a fellow crew member, peering out of the window of the 1940s DC-3 Basler, excitedly exclaimed, “There’s something.” And there was — a mountain, something we had not seen while living on the blank canvas high up at our isolated base.Finally we were on the runway for take-off. I caught a glimpse of Concordia Station, perched on its grand white plateau, before it disappeared from sight. Then it was three and a half hours of slow descent to sea level to an Italian coastal station.

Soon more mountains, valleys and bare rock face followed. Then we saw what appeared as a mirage — a strip of glistening, sparkling sea in the distance as we landed on the blue ice runway.

As I left the plane, I took a long, deep breath. Then, finding my movement unrestricted, I took a little jog. There was oxygen again, served on a salty sea breeze.

I picked up some earth and let it run through my fingers. A coastal wind felt strange as it caught my long winter beard. We headed in for dinner and later to our beds, but our altered day-night cycles drew a colleague and me out at 3:30 a.m., our reward a wonderful sunrise.

One more day’s delay, and we were finally boarding our flight to New Zealand. This time there were just five passengers on a South African Hercules C-130 aircraft.

The wheels kissed Antarctica a gentle goodbye as we lifted off in style, on board one of the greatest flying machines ever created.

We flew over Antarctica for nearly an hour of our eight-hour long flight back to civilization. As we swung a hard right, I watched as the ice disappeared from sight. The sun had set, and eventually all was dark until a few lights appeared below — signs of civilization. There were shouts of joy, cheers and hugs as we landed. My mobile phone buzzed, you have a message, then another and then many more.

At the hotel, I stood at the door until I remembered I needed a key. I hadn’t used a key all year — after all, what was the point of locking your front door when we hadn’t expected any visitors while living buried deep in Antarctica, our nearest neighbors astronauts orbiting in space?

My partner had flown out to meet me and helped me re-adapt — crossing busy roads, ordering food and more. One week off-continent, and things still take me by surprise.

I stood in a supermarket with aisles stacked as high as my previous home on the ice. People buzzed around, busily fishing for supplies, as I gazed shell-shocked and unable to move.

Jack, a local hairdresser, chopped away my Antarctic beard and hair, which had been a science experiment to see how long they could grow over a year. The process of “de-bearding” was a traumatic experience in itself, but I soon began to recognize my former self in the mirror. Every so often I caught myself reaching and gesturing for my absent beard, like a phantom limb.

I sat in a mall sipping a skinny latte coffee, awkwardly selected from a menu as long as my arm. For a year I had only been able to order “a coffee.” There was choice again, alongside trees, people, cars, noise and smells. Initially I was overwhelmed, and my perception and perspective flooded — this was sensory overload. It was as if I were a child again, learning things for the first time, except with prior memories. I felt free.

To escape from the city, we hired a convertible and drove into rural New Zealand. Surrounded by every green I could ever imagine, and after an hour of sunshine with the wind through my hair, it rained heavier than I could remember, soaking me through to the bone. It felt wonderful.

Driving through the magnificent New Zealand countryside, I felt as if I were in one of my Antarctic mid-winter dreams. Burdened by luxurious excess in all my senses, I shuddered at the prospect of waking up, living again in black and white in the height of winter.

I realized this dramatic change when returning from long periods of isolation is just as interesting as the isolation itself, involving a period of rehabilitation to “normal living.” For some the landing can be rough and off-target.

In remote environments, people undergo a well-studied change and can develop “winter-over syndrome,” which can involve depression, irritability, anger, insomnia, inability to concentrate and avoidance tactics — not to mention the ‘1,000-yard (Antarctic) stare.” I saw it and felt it; no one in our crew was spared.

However, comparatively little has been done to study the minds and processes of those undergoing re-adaptation when returning to civilization after such periods, though it often manifests itself with similar symptoms. I have termed this process of (mal)adaptation “re-entry syndrome.”

Those experiencing it have an overbearing feeling of disconnection, uncoupling and detachment from civilization and “normal life.” They can also suffer avoidance and social withdrawal, seeking solitude and seclusion, alongside troubled sleep and dreams, similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is almost as if we had been stripped to our raw forms by the Antarctic winter, left protected only by our ingrained behaviors.

I have heard many stories of “Polies” (South Pole winter-over members) disappearing into Asia for months or choosing to live behind closed hotel room doors before again answering the call of the Great White Wild for another winter. In fact, I will be back on the continent after a month at home, but only for the tourist’s summer season — a mild experience compared with wintering.

Meanwhile, my memories return, and I am reassured that all has not been lost. It is as if my own internal hard-drive is being successfully recovered and rebooted.

I soon arrived in Hong Kong. At the Hong Kong Royal Geographical Society, I delivered a presentation about my experiences. Hong Kong was wonderfully tiring; I also visited two schools where I also delivered further presentations. I was inundated there by questions from curious young minds. Being in Hong Kong, I had plunged into the deep end after a year of treading water, and the contrasts were vivid: Above me, skyscrapers towered precariously on misty hills; downwards, I was reminded that I still faced the challenge of re-learning to tie my shoelaces.

The rain fell hard and fast, and I dug my hands into my jacket and walked off into a sea of people. It was a long way from the Great White Silence.

In years to come, those of us who had endured the past winter will recall it, in the quieter moments back in our normal lives, as one of the world’s greatest, most challenging and peculiar journeys. I have called it “The Worst Winter in the World.” Make no mistake: on Planet Concordia, you can leave feeling as if you had fought in a war — against Antarctica, for survival. But in time, only the best parts will be remembered.

Back in Britain, as I close my laptop and this blog, my thoughts drift back across the Antarctic Plateau. I close my eyes, remembering feeling as tiny as an ant, hypoxic, in minus-80 degrees Celsius in the perpetual darkness under the Milky Way, as Aurora danced above me the tango of the universe.

It was Bob Dylan who helped me, the lone station doctor, through the difficult winter. In particular, the lyrics of “Mr. Tambourine Man” had rung true:

“Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,

Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,

With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,

Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

I think of Louis Armstrong. Sure it may not be a perfect world, but “what a wonderful world,” indeed.

Thank you for listening and sharing my journey.

Alex…

It was Lao-Tzu who said, “For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.”

In the past century, we have had several world wars, seen man take his first juvenile steps on the Moon and bore witness to the discovery and trail of devastation left by H.I.V./AIDS the world over.

Many argue and question why humans should venture out to other planets, and perhaps in the process create new problems, when we have so many problems on our own planet.  Among other things, there is a potential for forward and backward contamination of Mars and Earth.

To read the rest of this article, please visit

To view all my articles on The New York Times website, please visit my NY Times Blog page…