The Audacity of a Mountaineering Course

It was a weird time. I’d just finished engineering, and I mean this sincerely, with zero knowledge of the course I had apparently completed. What I did have was the fake confidence that the Ooty and Meghalaya trips had left me with, and a very firm opinion that a 9-to-5 in the corporate world was not for me. I wanted to roam free. So, with the job market as my search engine, I found the closest thing to “roaming free” that also paid a salary: a small travel company selling packages, where I got to be the middleman between the customer and the OTA for ₹13,000 a month.

Riveting stuff. I lasted exactly as long as it took to get thoroughly bored, which is to say not very long, before I went back to scrolling the internet for a way out. That’s when I stumbled onto a basic mountaineering course.

The maths of a bad decision

What sold me wasn’t the mountaineering. It was the price.

Twenty-eight days in Kashmir, accommodation and meals included, and you come out the other side trained in mountains and glaciers, for ₹7,500. I did the only maths I have ever been reliably good at: work two more months, save ₹15,000, spend half on the course and half on getting there. Tada. Budget travel’s finest hour.

I applied, got the seat, and packed a brand-new 75-litre bag I had absolutely no experience filling. I had never been to a gym in my life. My idea of hiking was 3,000 steps down to a village in Meghalaya. And now my stupid brain had decided I could be a mountaineer and signed me up for a month with the Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering and Winter Sports. The audacity of a man who had, at that point, walked up exactly one hill.

A batch of fifty-five

The best part of the whole thing had nothing to do with mountains. It was the people. Fifty-five of us, from all over India, and exactly one other Tamil guy, Vivek, who thankfully knew Hindi far better than my “thoda thoda.” I survived the entire course on his translations.

There was a seventeen-year-old in our batch who would go on to climb Everest. There was Rahat, a dive master and yoga instructor, who is the entire reason I now know that diving is a career and not just a hobby rich people have. There was Izaar, who had cycled the whole way from South India to Kashmir and had, understandably, a very different outlook on life than the rest of us. And there was Manav and Revant, exactly as clueless as I was and exactly my age, who’d go on to start their own adventure company in Hyderabad.

Taught entirely in a language I did not speak

Nobody told me the course would be conducted in Hindi. Surprise, surprise: I was about to attempt rock climbing, river crossing and ice climbing with no idea what my instructor was shouting at me. Turns out “just do what the person next to you is doing, slightly delayed and mildly terrified” is a universal language.

By day three, my legs had formally stopped taking instructions from my brain. In between, I crossed a freezing river, ziplined, camped out, saw snowfall for the first time in my life, and spotted a snow leopard across the river, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to write about myself. I ran 6 kilometres at altitude and thoroughly enjoyed putting my body through a level of shitstorm it had never signed up for. I came home a month later, ten kilograms lighter, having never once set foot in a gym.

Thirty days without a phone

The other thing thirty days off my phone gave me was time, and an excellent pretext for a prank on my friends back home. I am, and I say this with zero regret, an enormous asshole. No judgement, please.

The plan: I would tell everyone I’d fallen during a rock climbing exercise, hit my head, and lost my entire memory of college. Funnily enough, on the two-day train journey out to Kashmir, before any of this had even happened, I’d picked up a novel to read about a girl who loses her memory and the friends who rally around her. Whether that book planted the idea or just handed me the material to steal later, I genuinely can’t say. I am, apparently, a very convincing liar, because I kept the act running the whole month, and for two more weeks after I got home, mostly to see how people would react, and partly because I was, by that point, just cruising on the momentum of my own lie.

Some people were wonderfully patient with fake-amnesiac me. A few slapped me across the face the moment the truth came out. Both reactions were, in hindsight, completely fair. Worth it anyway. Another unforgettable couple of months.

What I actually walked away with

I didn’t walk away from Kashmir a mountaineer. I walked away with a burnt face, a badge from JIM&W, and a brotherly friendship with Vivek, someone I’d keep running back to for years afterward whenever I needed clarity or just someone outside my usual circle to talk to. At the time, though, it was just a certificate I’d earned by nearly falling apart in the snow for a month.

That certificate turned out to be the entire résumé I’d bring, less than a year on, to starting a trekking company I knew absolutely nothing about.

— Yoki