Hyderabad-based youngster Bharat Thammineni recently became the first south Indian to scale Mt. Lhotse. He scaled 27,940 ft to pull off the feat. The summit took him 51 days, given its rockiness and general toughness. It was in 2017 that the achiever scaled Mt. Everest. Two years before that, he had summitted Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa.

The adventure enthusiast wants to climb the highest peaks in all the continents. Bharat's ambitions are huge. He wants to scale 14 highest peaks in the world, five of which are in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Given that PoK is occupied by Pakistan, Indians are not allowed to scale the peaks there. Bharat, however, hopes for the day when this will go.

Speaking to a news agency, he says that mountaineers die during their heroic expeditions mainly because of "lack of mental strength" after a point.