Truth be told, there was no greater adventure in my life than Everest, no lesson more deeply felt than the one I learnt the day I overcame my fears and successfully crossed the Icefall of my dread forebodings.
It carried me through the deep depression of losing the most valuable film we had, the footage of a lifetime, to sabotage or an accident, most likely the former. The lesson I learnt on Everest of the value of dharma in my life has carried me past the depths of many bitter disappointments later.
Successfully completing the Everest film also answered a pressing question to myself, of my ability to successfully engage with an increasingly competitive media industry. When I had resigned as a member of the prestigious Tata Administrative Service, I was poised on the precipice of unemployment, looking down a bottomless void. I had no job, no income. For two years, I lived off some savings and my wife’s earnings as a film actor. I was scraping the bottom.
The Everest mission and its award-winning film taught me to fly against the odds. Despite crash landings, I have still managed to stay airborne.
I assumed that my colleagues in the Everest mission had learnt to fly as well. To my astonishment, even someone as successful as Bachendri, the first Indian woman on the Everest summit and the fifth in the world, was forced to stumble before she could truly fly.
During the 1984 expedition, Bachendri was an observer and a participant. After her unprecedented success and her confirmation as the manager of the Tata Adventure Foundation, she found a new motivation to put the lessons she had learnt on the mountain into practice. She decided, a few years later, to lead her own, exclusively all-women expedition to Mt Everest. Mind the phrase – all women. So far, it had been all men. Even though the primary aim in the 1984 expedition was to place India’s first woman on the summit, the women were not involved in training or strategy and played only a supporting role to the men. Even in the summit parties, they were following the men. No one is specifically to blame for this. Military expeditions are based on an unquestioned chain of command. An Army operation can scarcely be based on a popular vote. And women are seen in a supporting role not just in the Army, but in all of life.
Chandraprabha Aitwal, a steady but strong climber, had been named in the first two summit parties. It was her right to attempt the summit. But she was asked by the Deputy Leader, Col Premchand, to sacrifice her bid at the last moment and come down with him. These were orders not to be questioned. If the Deputy Leader’s assessment was that Chandraprabha was not a superior climber, then why was she named in the first place? He had been party to the decision. Again, if a woman on the summit was the mission objective, then Phu Dorjee’s place was in the support party, attached on a rope to a woman designated to reach the summit – in this case, Rita Gombu.
That he had hurried off and reached the summit any which way no doubt annoyed the Leader, who was not forthcoming in his congratulations to Phu Dorjee as he made his way down. In fact, the Leader asked him to make tea for the injured Bulgarian climbers, which revealed his priorities at that time. It also reflected the Army tradition of officers giving orders to JCOs or Junior Commissioned Officers, who are lower down in the chain of command. Women were even further down the pecking order. Phu Dorjee, angered by the order to make tea after reaching the summit, nonetheless glissaded down and made tea for the Bulgarians at Summit Camp.
Bachendri, after 1984, was determined to reverse this male command syndrome. The mountaineering skills she developed at the Tata Adventure Foundation emphasised leadership, communication and teamwork over pure adventure. This was appropriate to the Tata Steel management training ethos, and a stint at the Tata Adventure Foundation was made compulsory for Tata graduate engineer trainees. At that time, girls in remote areas were not allowed to participate in adventure activities, so Bachendri would go personally to convince the parents that she was in charge, and that their girls would be safe under her. At this time, even though a woman had reached the summit, there appeared to be no similar evangelism or intention of consolidating this feat in the IMF or in official circles. Everest 84 was probably judged as a one-off, an aberration trying to train civilian women. As Bachendri said when she mooted the idea of an All Women’s Expedition five years after her Everest 84 expedition, “No one was even thinking about an all-women expedition to Mount Everest.”
Mr HC Sarin was no longer president of the IMF. Captain MS Kohli, who became the new president, says that in 1989, Mr HC Sarin had voluntarily stepped down as president, IMF. Before he passed away in 1997, Mr Sarin had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and in the last two or three years of his life, apparently, he often imagined that he was climbing Everest with one of the Indian teams, which was poignantly revealing of his passion for mountaineering.
Captain Kohli was, therefore, alarmed when he learnt of Bachendri’s intention to conduct an expedition independent of the IMF. He insisted that she should not only conduct the expedition under the banner of IMF, but also jointly with Nepal, to make it an international event. Bachendri was beholden to him for the 1984 Everest expedition, and since the intention was anyhow to give more opportunities to women in mountaineering, Bachendri agreed.
There, it might be said, is where her problems began.
In the initial stages, seeking permissions from the Nepal government, holding selection expeditions and selecting the final all-women team began smoothly enough.
This was already 1990. Preparations and permissions took a full three years, compared to possibly three days or three hours in the commercial era of Everest today. Having agreed to operate under the banner of the IMF, Bachendri found, to her consternation, no support from the IMF. This is surprising, since Captain Kohli remained president till 1993, the year of Bachendri’s All Women’s Everest Expedition. Perhaps he did not have the unquestioned authority of Mr Sarin. The Sponsoring Committee of the IMF regretted their inability to provide funds. The working women chosen by Bachendri were refused leave by their employers. It was like a stab in the back for her.
Bachendri fell into depression. She could not turn to anyone for help. She recalls sitting, agonised, on the roof of the IMF building, which was perched on a quiet hilltop in Delhi, watching the stars and the Diwali lights exploding with her dreams.
Help came from an unexpected quarter. Providentially, she met Akhil Bakshi, a mountain lover, who was in the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office). She had known him earlier when he was the DG of the Nehru Yuva Kendra. He promised her help.
Another enlightened colleague she met, I am happy to say, was my class fellow from St Stephen’s College, Dr SY Qureshi, the then Joint Secretary, Department of Youth Affairs and Sports, who also came to her aid just in time.
Suddenly, Bachendri found that she wasn’t alone after all; there were people in the right places to lend a hand. She had just needed to reach out to them. Mr Sarin, whose brainchild it was to put a woman on the Everest summit, was not there to give her encouragement now. Her own fellow IMF members were not on board. Even though Bachendri was their protege, it seemed they could not understand the ambitions and feelings of women mountaineers. And this, when the president of IMF had urged her to organise the expedition under the aegis of the IMF and facilitated Nepal’s participation! The IMF was even playing down the achievements of the two pre-Everest women’s selection expeditions. Prejudices, it seems, are hard to bury. Particularly when male egos are ruffled. Bachendri mentioned that a senior member of the IMF board was furious when Bachendri refused to include his relative in the expedition because she had not participated in the pre-Everest selections. It seemed to be a case of uncompromising integrity versus the Old Boys’ Club. Bachendri, in her book on her 1993 expedition, Reaching for the Sky, laments the bias of the IMF toward civilian expeditions in general and female expeditions in particular. She adds bitterly that there was no point in including women as members of IMF, and imagining that they were serving the cause of women, if such humiliation and negative behaviour continued.
Not surprisingly, Bachendri never planned another expedition with the IMF, nor, I believe, did she renew her membership, which perhaps the IMF now treats as permanent. To my mind, the loss is that of the IMF.
Despite the opposition and extreme frustration, or perhaps because of it, the 1993 Indo-Nepalese Women’s Everest Expedition became a turning point for Bachendri. She succeeded in placing eighteen members, seven women and eleven men, on the summit over two attempts on 10 May and May 16, 1993, an unbeaten record for a single expedition.
This remarkable achievement was the result of detailed planning, constant interaction, meetings and building fellowship within the team, including the Sherpas, who became like family, eating and living together, reviewing each member’s nutrition, fitness, track record, psychological and motivational issues and leading from the front. She carried loads with the members right up to Camp 3 at 24,000 feet and spent three debilitating weeks at Camp 2 or Advance Base Camp at 22,000 feet, where she lost over 10 kg, so much so that when she came down to Base Camp, she was unrecognisable. I would say that between her and her Deputy Leader Rita Gombu – who were perfectly in sync, like peas in a pod, both in constant communication with each other and with the team and leading by example – this was a perfect example of “copy book management”, disdained by the Leader of our 1984 Expedition. More than a copybook, it was common sense.
