Calcutta: Satyabrata Dam may be hailed as the first Bengali to set foot on Mount Everest in 2004 and Basanta Singha Roy and Debashis Biswas the first Bengali civilians to achieve the feat in 2010.

But the world's highest peak has been beckoning Bengalis long before they were born - since 1960, when A.K. Chowdhury and Sudhangshu Das were part of a team led by Brigadier Gyan Singh.

To mark Everest Day (May 29), Sonarpur Arohi and the Indian Mountaineering Federation, east zone, brought together and felicitated on Saturday a constellation of climbers who have over the years set off for the 8,848m peak.

The peak was first climbed by Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay from Bengal on May 29, 1953.

"This (the felicitation) is our salute to those who showed us the way," said Satyarup Siddhanta, an organiser and the first Bengali to complete the Seven Summits - the highest peaks in all continents.

It was an evening of nostalgia as a slide show recapitulated the Everest story, followed by the felicitation by singer Pratul Mukherjee and Sudipta Sengupta, the first Indian woman to set foot on Antarctica.

Speaking to the old-timers on the sidelines of the event revealed how different were the obstacles they faced. Said Bivujit Mukhoti, who had attempted the peak twice, in 1991 and 1993: "These days technology has advanced so much that it is possible to wrap up an Everest expedition in 20 days. In our time, it took two-and-a- half months."

They deduced the weather from studying the shapes of clouds and the temperature at sunrise and sunset. The weather forecast on the radio were nowhere as accurate as now.

Manik Banerjee, 73, was a student in 1965 when he witnessed the felicitation of a team that included Arun Chakraborty, the third Bengali to attempt Everest after Chowdhury and Das, at Rabindra Sarobar stadium.

Banerjee would be part of an expedition organised by the armed forces in 1985.

"The Met department gave us a frequency to which we had to tune in to listen to the Himalayan weather bulletin they broadcast on our request. It was mostly off the mark," he smiled.

Today, satellite phones have revolutionised communication in the mountains. Peter Hillary had called father Edmund from the Everest summit on a satellite phone.

But sending a message across was an uphill task earlier. "I once paid a foreign team $500 to send a fax from the base camp. They had brought the machine along," Mukhoti recounted.

Permission to climb would be given to one team at a time while the next waited. "We had to lay our own route," said Banerjee. His team had split into two - one tried to reach the peak from the south-east ridge and other over the south-west face. Neither succeeded. Five of the team members did not return.

"People celebrate only the summits but we did it without sherpas," said Soumitra Ganguli, who was part of the same teams as Mukhoti in 1991 and 1993.

For Rita Chakraborty, the first Bengali woman to set off for Everest, the hurdles included domestic ones. "When I first went mountaineering, I did not tell my mother," laughed the five-time national water polo champion.

The programme for the first time in Bengal gave all Everest campaigners an equal platform. "We are touched that they remember us," Ganguli said.