It is getting crowded on top of Mount Everest. On May 20, 2026, the world’s tallest mountain looked less like the last frontier of human endurance and more like the security queue at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport during a delayed monsoon departure, and the base camp like the Churchgate station at rush hour. That May day, 274 people summited from the Nepal side alone. At that altitude, where the air contains barely a third of the oxygen available at sea level, the traffic jam was not just metaphorical. The remarkable thing about Everest today is that the challenge increasingly appears to lie not in climbing the mountain, but in finding the correct sequence of windows through which one is permitted to attempt it. First........

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