Reaching Great Heights, Literally!
Dignity Dialogue|June 2020
Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman to conquer Mount Everest, was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2019. Rajesh Bayas pens a profile and recalls some of the conversations he had with her.
Rajesh Bayas
Reaching Great Heights, Literally!

One of the 14 Pad-ma Bhushan awardees in 2019 was Bachendri Pal. It’s a name that immediately brings to mind lofty peaks and the game of life and death. Pal, born May 24, 1954, after all, is a mountaineer, who in 1984 became the first Indian woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Pal certainly made history. But perhaps it was meant to be, considering that she was born only five days before the first anniversary of the original ascension of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. “I don’t know if that is what destiny had designed for me but my love for the mountains goes back to when I was just 12 years old. At that time, along with my friends, I scaled a 13,123 feet high peak during a school picnic,” she once stated.

Bachendri Pal was on born to a Bhotiya family in Nakuri in the Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand. She was one of five children to Hansa Devi and Kishan Singh Pal, a border tradesman who supplied groceries from India to Tibet. She completed her MA and B.Ed. from DAV Post-Graduate College, Dehradun and on the invitation of her school principal, she was sent to college for higher studies. In 1982, during her course at Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, she climbed Mount Gangotri 1 at 21,889.77 feet and Mount Rudragaria at 19,091 feet.

This story is from the June 2020 edition of Dignity Dialogue.

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This story is from the June 2020 edition of Dignity Dialogue.

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