Chris Sharma is the best rock climber in America, and probably the best sport climber in the world:
When he completed his long-time project Realization in Ceuse, France in 2001, the route was arguably the hardest in the world…Sharma [has] won the World Cup of Climbing, [but] it was later recalled after he tested positive for THC, although THC is not a performance enhancing drug. He returned the cup. [Link]
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p>Sharma has continuously pushed the limits of the sport, climbing routes more difficult than virtually anybody else:
Chris Sharma, the 24-year-old monkey boy who in 2001 introduced the world to 5.15 climbing (the sport’s hardest grade), recently cobbled together a new boulder problem, across the roof of an Ozarks cave, that some say is one of the hardest lines ever completed. [Link]
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p>I got really excited when I first heard his name. This guy who climbs like a mountain macaca … could his name really be Krishna Omprakash Sharma? I mean, that pot thing is so Harold & Kumar.
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p>Nope. Despite his desi middle and last names, he’s neither [racially] desi nor hadesi, he’s actually a hidesi [desi with either Hippie or Hindu convert parents]. His parents are disciples of Baba Hari Dass, “who has not spoken since 1952 and communicates by writing on a small chalkboard.”
Chris was born at home to Gita Jahn, a local masseuse and healing artist, and Bob Sharma, a maintenance supervisor at UCSC. His parents were married at Mt. Madonna Center. Babagi [Should be Baba – Ennis] Hari Dass, the spiritual leader and founder of the center, gave them their last name of Sharma. He also gave Chris his middle name, Omprakash…” [Link]
He also seems to be a chela himself, since he named a climbing route after his Guru.
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p>Sharma attributes his prodigious success to the mental poise gained by meditation:
In 2001, Sharma nailed the hardest climb on earth, Realization, a 5.15a overhang in France that had stymied him 30 times before he succeeded. Surprisingly, he describes the climb as a mental, not physical, challenge. Says Sharma, “To see the whole thing, I had to be in the moment.”
Sharma credits his heightened mental awareness to his daily meditation practice. “Meditation’s important for balance,” he says. “You need to rely on yourself to quiet the mind. I know having more of a mental calm has helped me when I try something that’s very difficult. It makes you realize that you’re not always going to be at your best, because when you meditate, you’re paying close attention to your body and how it feels. As a result, you’re at ease when things don’t work out. You learn to appreciate the lows, just let them happen, learn from them, and go back and try again…” [Link]
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p>Here’s an extended clip of him showing how he created “Realization”, the climb referred to above as “the hardest climb on earth”:
And a shorter one of him strutting his stuff at a contest. He’s got moves that would put spider man, desi or not, to shame:
damn. the world would be a better place if politicians would follow this principle.. i can visualize the chalkboards now…
hmm…wonder if this
monkeyboy likes bananas… the elaichi type.. or the costa rican type.. hmm..pretty cool.
hmm.. maybe george allen will call him ‘the macaca of macaca’s’ or maybe this monkey will teach allen to shut up and write on chalkboards.. or maybe he will sing the macaca blues..
okay i will shut up now.
🙂 what do you think mr. ennis?
What an amazing video! thanks, Ennis
he’s a total hippie and really nice. does like hitting the bong an awful lot, though. i met him at a climbing party a few days before i got hurt.
I blogged about him because his name is C. Omprakash Sharma. We’ve long been blogging people with desi names, even if they’re white.
Secondarily, he’s sort of like the guys in my last post (which you weren’t that enthusiastic about either), non-brown people who grew up within a desi religion (although perhaps less so for him).
Hitting bongs is not allowed around here. Hitting on bongs is a different matter.
It’s also handy to have atheletes with desi names out there. For example, when I have to give my last name over the phone, I can now say “Singh, like the golfer.” Somewhere out there, some kid can now say “Sharma, like the climber” =)
There are quite a few desis at the climbing wall of my last university. The majority are white, though. What I found remarkable was not the racial breakdown but that it’s filled with engineering/physics/math/economics and other supposedly “geeky” types but completely lacking participation from the humanities crowd. Can’t guess why.
or you can just surrender and give up your ethnic name like i did!
Because climbing is very technical – it not only involves equipment, but it requires solving complicated puzzles. Engineers, mathematicians, etc like it for the same reason that they like their work – they find it challenging and mentally stimulating.
It’s a very different kind of critical reasoning from what humanities people do. Here you’re either right or wrong.
I didn’t know this until one day, the girl at the desk at the climbing gym looked up from her homework and asked “Does anybody know the second law of thermodynamics?” and all people present (except the folks on the wall at that moment, of course), some 10-15 people, raised their hands.
That sounds like good logic to me, Ennis. I see that you’ve switched to capital ‘E’ now. 🙂
Better not be wrong on a rock face 🙂
This seems to be a more general trend (although to a much smaller extent than climbing) that artsy types tend to work out, participate in sports etc. a lot less often than the jobby (all the above named areas to lawyers/doctors/MBA’s etc) types. This seems to happen only after college and clearly does not apply to undergrads where the trend seems the other way. Also, smoking is much higher among artists.
A few months after the Second-Law-Incident, I asked a sculptor friend this question. His answer was “Art is about subversion. We do not stick to the mainstream and to mainstream notions of what is good. ‘Healthy’ and ‘wholesome’ hold little appeal for us. It’s the same reason we don’t wear suits and sometime wear beat-up clothes…”. I hope that’s not the real reason.
I thought one of main points of argument on this site was that “desi” had nothing to do with being Hindu.
You do not need to be Hindu to be desi. Yet being Hindu obviously has something to do with being desi. Being Hindu is, often, a sufficient but not necessary condition.
This, btw, is totally awesome. Rock climbers are wonderful to watch.
Will a white/black westerner with a name like Anna John or Abdullah Azizi get profiled here?
This is totally academic, btw. I enjoyed the post.
Of all the names his family could have used, they chose Sharma? It is good that they are in the US and not in India. If they were in South India, his parents’ choice would have made his chances of getting into a professional college a lot harder.
It’s a bayesian issue. Virtually all of the Sharmas in the world are desis, whereas a smaller percentage of people with the names you listed above are. That doesn’t mean that desis with those names are any less desi, but it does mean that when I hear the name I wont jump to the conclusion that they are of SouthAsian origin.
The point of the post was that I thought he was desi at first, and then found out he wasn’t.
Lastly, the intersection between religion and ethnicity is tricky. I wont blog about just any random white Christian, but I might blog about a white Christian who belongs to an Indian denomination. Similarly for a Muslim or Buddhist. With white (or black) Hindus / Sikhs / Jains, since the religions started in India, I might well blog about the people in question. It all depends on how close the connection is to South Asia and South Asian culture.
They didn’t choose Sharma, their Guru, Baba Hari Dass (chalkboard wale) did. They accepted his choice.
The term is sport climber, not sports climber (as opposed to traditional or trad climbing).
:-). Just giving you a hard time, ennis. I would have blogged this myself.
Here’s some random funda-ology that I wouldn’t hold against you for not knowing
If you lined up all Anna Johns of the world, most of them would be desis. Why? It is common practice in Kerala and Tamil Nadu to have the father’s first name as the child’s last name. So double first names like John Thomas, Xavier Matthew, John Matthew, Thomas John are much more likely to be Mallu than Western. Many Hindus in Tamil Nadu also have names like Arun Srinivasan, Vijay Kannappan, Anand Sridharan, Priya Rajan etc. where the last name is simply the first name of the dad. Westerners don’t get too curious about that, though since they can’t tell whether these are first/last male/female names anyway.
As for Abdullah, India has the second largest Muslim population in the world. Desiland probably has the majority of Muslims since Pakistan and Bangladesh are almost entirely Muslim and have huge populations.
cough
This guy smokes dope? I don’t believe that for a second….
The great assasins of the world also have double first names…lee harvey oswald, James Earl Ray, sirhan sirhan. what i’m saying is that someone better keep an eye on elton john.
Amen to that.
I love white boys who meditate. That’s hot!!!!
If his name was Bob Rubinstein, would he be still featured on this blog?
Jasper Johns? Fred Roberts? Clarence Thomas? I know about the Mallu Xtian double naming convention, but there are still way more white xtians who have such names, for various reasons, than mallus. [The middle one is Mr. Roberts, btw]
It all depends on what his connection to the desh, in various forms, is. He might or might not be.
27% of the world’s muslims are SouthAsian. Using numbers from islamicpopulation.com:
Muslim population in each country in millions: India 154.504 Pakistan 157.528 Bangladesh 127.3286 Afghanistan 29.601 Sri Lanka 1.5 Total SA 470.4616
Total world 1757.96
South Asian share of the world’s muslim population: 26.76%
Razib, man, isn’t this your job?
🙂 I love that the SM community is unembarrassed about nitpicking. So… The site you linked to had a total of 1043.71 million. Did you get that other number from a different source? Perhaps it’s newer. Perhaps I read the wrong numbers off. Anyway, if that were the case, it would still be only 45.07%, not over 50%. Note to self: Gotta stop overestimating the power of the desi population.
Johns and Roberts are last names. Here are some I have collected – Paul Simon, Dave Thomas (founder of Wendy’s), Fritz John (mathematician)
But your Bayesian argument is makes a lot of sense. ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ intersect so much that if a person is one, the chances of him/her being the other are very high. A non-desi named Abdullah would not surprise me at all whereas a non-desi named Omprakash would. As for whether he’s connected to India, let’s run the thought experiment of asking him whether he has any connection with India. I’d bet he would not say “No”.
Kurma:
The 1.04 Billion number is Asia alone, so South Asia is around 45% of Asia’s Muslims.
The world figure is here, although other sources put it at only 1.2 Billion. I chose to use all numbers from the same source for consistency.
This is a first– someone I actually know about!
My son reports that he (Chris Sharma) is a really nice guy. He gave a talk and showed the “making of the video video” at Mount Madonna School a few years ago. People at Mount Madonna are pretty proud of him (ironically he dropped out of their school and became a professional rock climber.) You can sometimes catch him at Pacific Edge in Santa Cruz.
And I’m guessing the article was trying to get “Baba-ji” phonetically. I get the G-J mix up all the time when people say my name, or try to say it. And yes, using a chalkboard (it’s only about 5×7– he used to use a smaller one) makes for pretty pithy conversation.
Thanks, Ennis.
Kurma, a “Mr Hopkins” would like to have a word with you.
DJDP, You know that’s not a good example.
“Johns Hopkins” isn’t a good example of someone with “Johns” as a first name? @=)
We’re in accordance: Johns are Roberts are last names. Johns Hopkins was named after his grandmother’s surname. And the SS office has this to say: “Johns is not in the top 1000 names for any year of birth in the last 100 years. Please enter another name.” [link] Still, I had to provide an example of the exception.
On a tangential but semi-related note, I saw the movie The Departed last weekend, and there is a segment where a non-Keshdhari (but kara-wearing) Sikh guy’s convenience store is being robbed. The thugs keep calling him “Babu”. I’m not going to include any spoilers here, but watch out for exactly what the Sikh guy says to them in response. Ennis and other Singhs will definitely smile.
Anyway, back to the main topic…..Carry on…..
More connections to India.
A few years ago Chris also made a movie of his climbing pilgrimage to Hampi, called “Pilgrimage” (there’s a link on this page to a video clip: http://www.climbing.com/av/). It was a pretty good movie, as far as these things go, and Chris was a nice guy at the premier.
actually, most of the climbers i know are humanities types — history, art, theatre, and film people. there are a few math and science types i climb with, but most of the ‘better’ climbers i know are not your sciency cerebral type. maybe that’s why (as an erstwhile biophysicist) i got hurt and retired! you can approach a climb from either a technical view, or from a more organic view. i just sorta liked to go with the flow of things and climb the route as it presented itself, instead of puzzling it all out ahead of time.
you can be a trad climber and a sport climber. i started out sport and moved to trad because the sport options in the northeast are limited. retrospectively, i should have stayed sport! i wouldn’t have gotten into such a terrible accident if i weren’t on a trad lead! maybe it was my holdover sport climber mentality that got me into trouble.
This is tangential, and maybe a little late as I notice most of these posts are from 2006, but you can be right or wrong in the humanities too. Historians for instance, cannot just make things up. Neither can translators, who are also in the humanities. At least, they should not be doing this. Musicians also generally do not just make things up… 🙂 But, I see what you mean that the humanities do have a more subjective element too it–there is more room for personal style maybe.
Johns is a simplification of “Johnson”. It’s a valid surname. As are Adams, Philips, etc.
Going with the flow is even harder though, if you’re no good at solving 3-D puzzles in real time, which is what climbing is. Almost all the climbers I know are pretty techical types – math or engineering, with a few economists, but my sample is biased.
is that based on your extensive climbing experience? 🙂 i have to say that solving 3-D puzzles is less than half the battle. solving the puzzle doesn’t do much if you can’t make your body follow through on the intellectual exercise. I think just because math/engineering types may be attracted to climbing, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good at it. you get alot of muscle memory on how to climb certain types of routes, which can help you more than the actual mental exercise of puzzling something out. people think of climbing as so technical, but there is alot of ‘feel’ to it. and if you’re strong, you can power your way up climbs in a ‘technically’ incorrect manner, and still get through them.
elitism alert: i differentiate between recreational/gym/indoor enthusiasts and “real” climbers. 🙂
Climbing is very geeky, because you get to solve problems with your body. Woohoo! Not to be confused with interpretive dance, where most of the movements create more problems for the interpreter. Besides, when climbing things, physics (gravity, friction, and force) suddenly becomes important. Sharma rules.
Mr. Kobayashi, have we met in real life?
I mean, in person.
Ah, this is kind of old news. Chris Sharma has been famous in climbing circles for years and years. I think I first heard about him in 1999. If you think he’s badass now, you shoulda seen him then.
sohwhat:
I would say that climbing above a 5.10, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to “improv” your way up a route, especially outdoors. You have to sequence it in advance, because certain moves (especially “cusp” moves, where the whole route kind of hinges) are not obvious, or require a particular set of arm and leg movements. It’s sometimes a lot harder to be “organic” at that point. I think a lot of people who aren’t typically attracted to team sports like climbing because it’s a personal challenge–that’s why I like it, anyway. You compete with a rock face and yourself, not with other people. I don’t think they’re any better or worse for being engineers or software developers, or humanities majors, or unemployed, for that matter. You’re only as good as the practice you put in, and your willingness to learn.
I’m curious–are any SM types in DC climbers? Anyone want to head up to Carderock / Great Falls or Sport Rock in Alexandria / Rockville anytime before the weather gets terrible?
I wasn’t blogging back then 😉
More importantly, there are many things we blog about that are not “fresh” stories, we simply judge them to be interesting and relatively time-insensitive. In this case, his name is still Chris Omprakash Sharma, and he is still one of the best sport climbers in the world, so I figured I would write about him.
How true!
Hitting bongs is not allowed around here.
Sigh. Humankind has been deprived of pleasure for too long 🙂
Oh, I was not trying to show the two as being mutually exclusive — I was merely mentioning the different kinds, that’s all (and the fact that the author had spelt sport as sports).
I started out sport and do some trad, but I do enjoy leading trad from time to time. Sport is usually done under the “all conditions are stable” assumption, while trad is more for folks who like climbing out there, so to speak.
Cheers.
I wanna go! 😀 Sure, I’ve never been climbing, but
a) I am a macaca and
b) I have plenty of shtuff from EMS which should touch rocks and things, so that it doesn’t cry from non-use. 😉
Chris’s last name was chagned to Sharma, His real last name was Pitts im his cousin. The only reason he got Sharma as his last name was because his dad who was kinda the out cast of the 5 kids in his family changed his name to be unique.
his last name is a punjabi name