Seven years ago, actor Kubbra Sait summited in Leh, Ladakh, climbing to an altitude of 6,153 mts above sea level. “So, I thought I could easily do 5,900 mts of Mount Kilimanjaro [NE of Tanzania, near the Kenyan border],” says the effervescent Sait over a video call. “But it was a completely different ball game and I only decided two months ago.” The actor was on the trail for nine days, with a 15-hour descent after an eight-and-a-half hour climb the day before. And to think, just up to 10 days before she left for Africa, the actor was negotiating with herself and about to cancel the trip.

“I told myself, if I cancel the tickets now, I could get a part refund, etc etc,” she says, grey-green eyes sparklingly as vivaciously as the diamond nose-pin perched on her equine features. “But I am grateful to myself that I did not quit. I was fighting stress with stress; using stress as an excuse to not do many things. But I wanted to do something special, important and that challenged me.”