TAKING OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT

Hailing from Amarkantak, a town nestled amid mountains in Madhya Pradesh, love for activities like mountain climbing, paragliding and bouldering came naturally to Abhimanyu Saxena, co-founder of edtech start-up Scaler

- Chitra Nair

When IIT Hyderabad graduates Abhimanyu Saxena and his friend Anshuman Singh quit their jobs to launch Scaler, the first thing they did was to go on a weeklong hike to Himachal Pradesh-a toast to new beginnings, as Saxena agrees to call it.

Saxena spent childhood in Amarkantak, then a sparsely populated town surrounded by a forest and mountains on the banks of River Narmada in Madhya Pradesh. He owes his love for adventure activities like mountain climbing, bouldering and trekking to his early year Years later, as a college student, he would set off with his friends founders of the Hyderabad Adventure Club for treks or trails every weekend. The group covered the seven hills of Tirumala in four days. They also trekked near Dudhsagar waterfalls in Goa, much before "it became famous after Shah Rukh Khan's Chennai Express". The place is beautiful, but one needs to take precautions to avoid leeches all over one's legs, he warns.