Faculty member Arpita Patra is on a loft quest
When Arpita Patra woke, it was pitch dark. It took her a minute to gather her senses. As she slowly realised where she was, excitement rushed through her. She jumped up, put on her gear, and ran out of the tent.
It was D-day at Barafu camp, the highest camp on Mount Kilimanjaro. Nervous anticipation rippled through the group in preparation for the summit attempt. Arpita grabbed a quick bite of porridge and set off into the darkness at 2 am.
Excited and impatient, she walked ahead of the group with a guide. Their headlamps lit the rocky path ahead, as they climbed through the thinning air and loose scree rocks, pausing occasionally to catch their breath.
A few hours later, as the sun started to peek above the horizon, she started realising something was not quite right. There was a mild ache in her temples and nausea was creeping up – two tell-tale signs of altitude mountain sickness (AMS). She wasn’t alarmed though. She kept sipping water and slowed her pace, letting her body gradually acclimatise to the higher altitude. After a particularly strenuous slope, she reached the rim of the summit crater, called Stella Point. The first, and longest, part of the climb was over.
Waiting for the rest of her group, she looked into the bowl-like centre of Kilimanjaro. The terrain looked like a scene from the moon, with rugged rocks and monochrome slopes, and in the far distance, a glimpse of glacial mountains and the vast African plains below.
Once the group caught up, they began the final push to the summit. By now, the sun was well above the horizon. Around mid-day, they finally reached the signboard she’d been waiting to see.
“Congratulations! You are now at Uhuru Peak Tanzania, 5,895 MAMSL (metres above mean sea level). Africa’s highest point.” She read the words again and again until it sunk in. She will remember the day forever – July 17, 2024, her first-ever summit.
But the adventure wasn’t over yet.
After basking in the glory of a successful summit, the group trekked back towards Stella Point, their camp spot for the night. By 3 pm, the winds were picking up but they managed to pitch their tents. Head still throbbing, Arpita crawled into her sleeping bag and crashed. Half an hour later, she got up with a start for the second time that day. Her tent was whipping furiously in the wind. A group mate peeped in, shouting over the noise that they had to evacuate as fast as possible. One of the other tents had just flown away.
She jumped up, nausea be damned, grabbed her things, and rushed downhill with the others. Black dust hit them all around, making it hard to see more than three feet ahead. She tripped over loose stones every few steps, but survival instinct kept her inching downward under darkening skies. It was way past sunset when they finally reached the camp they had left earlier that morning. Arpita waited a few hours for dinner and tents to be set up, and then hit the hay. Again.
“Up until that summit camp [before the storm], everything was fine. I was going quite fast and I was confident. In retrospect, I was overconfident,” Arpita admits. It’s been months since her Kilimanjaro adventure in July 2024. Sitting in her office in the Department of Computer Science and Automation (CSA), IISc, Arpita is unfazed by the life-threatening experience of climbing down the mountain. Besides, she muses, this ordeal would probably be nothing compared to summitting Mount Everest. Which, if her plans go right, will be in another two years.
Arpita Patra is on a life quest to climb the Seven Summits – the highest peaks on each continent – and the Seven Volcanic Summits. That’s 12 peaks in total (Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Elbrus appear on both lists).
Arpita Patra is on a life quest to climb the Seven Summits – the highest peaks on each continent – and the Seven Volcanic Summits
Arpita grew up in remote West Bengal, walking to school with her two younger sisters, and doing her homework under the light of kerosene lamps. “We didn’t have a TV. I used to run to someone’s house in the neighbouring village to watch BR Chopra’s Mahabharat series,” she recalls, laughing.
One thing she yearned for was the chance to explore different places. Travel was an unaffordable luxury given her father’s school teacher salary. But her parents ensured that she had plenty of books to read. In stories by Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, she read of many characters who were explorers. “Through their eyes, I loved seeing the world.”
She found deep kinship with a character in Bandyopadhyay’s book Chander Pahar – a young village lad named Shankar, who voyages to Africa, seeing wildlife and hunting for diamonds in virgin forests. “Some day I want to retrace Shankar’s path. That kind of exploration, away from the crowds, intrigued me. I wanted to taste nature in its true sense.”
Arpita excelled in academics, finishing 10th grade early at 14 years old, and pursuing a BTech degree. “I liked theoretical computer science. It is comprehensive and unravels a lot of mysteries about computation,” she says.
‘That kind of exploration, away from the crowds, intrigued me. I wanted to taste nature in its true sense’
She then did an MS Research degree at IIT Madras on pattern recognition and image processing, went on to study cryptography in her PhD, and completed three postdocs at different universities across the world.
“I did not have a single break!” she laughs. “You know how they say, ‘if you work hard in your childhood, later you can be laidback?’ That is just not true!”
When she joined IISc as an Assistant Professor in 2014, the grind continued. She got an early promotion, received funding for several research projects, and won a few awards.
The forced break during COVID-19 finally gave her pause to reflect on her life. “I suddenly felt … am I doing enough in this one life? I’m just following the same track as whoever joins academia,” she says. In January 2024, she watched a biographical film titled True Spirit about an Australian teenager who circumnavigated the world alone on a boat. “I thought: ‘I am more than double her age; why don’t I have that kind of clarity? I too had plenty of dreams. What happened to those?’”
Thus was born Expedition Aparajita, her ambitious goal to scale 12 summits. “Aparajita means invincible. It’s a word that resonated with me when I was in high school … I wanted to name my daughter that,” she notes. (And she did).
‘I suddenly felt … am I doing enough in this one life? I’m just following the same track as whoever joins academia’
Her husband was supportive of the whole endeavour. “He must have thought I was crazy,” she says, laughing. But she didn’t tell her parents at first, not wanting to worry them.
Arpita sought advice from Satyarup Siddhanta, a Guinness World record holder for the youngest person in the world to climb both the Seven Summits and Seven Volcanic Summits. Luckily, he was planning to go to Kilimanjaro in July 2024 with a group, and Arpita signed up immediately.
To gauge her fitness, she first attempted a trek in the Sikkim Himalayas. “Not everybody’s body is meant for mountains. You might be fit on the plains, but mountains pose a different challenge – there is less oxygen, more air pressure and AMS can kick in,” she explains.
The Goechala trek in Sikkim lasted 10 days, going up to 4,600 metres altitude and crossing 100 km including long climbs and steep descents. “That was my first ever trek. And it just opened the horizon to me. Sleeping in tents, gazing at stars … These were my dreams!” she reminisces, wistfully. “I knew … I am capable of doing this.”
Though mountaineers are advised to start from easy and move on to intense treks, Arpita felt impulsively confident. “If I plan to do something, I just do it.”
That attitude became even more crucial during her second expedition to Mount Elbrus.
On a late August evening in 2024, Arpita boarded a flight from Bangalore to Mineralnye Vody Airport in Russia, eager to scale the snowy slopes of Elbrus.
Although slightly shorter than Kilimanjaro, Elbrus is more difficult to summit. Its icy winds are brutally cold, and reaching the summit involves climbing 1,500 metres in a single day.
After spending the night at a hotel in the town of Terskol, she woke up with a severe headache. She powered through the first day’s acclimatisation hike but by the time she reached her room again, her body was burning up. The next two days were a blur of high fever, severe muscle pain, and throbbing temples. She was not able to move from her bed. But she had no choice. A lot of time and money had already been spent. It was now or never.
On the third day, despite feeling ill, she joined the group on a cable car that took them to a higher base camp from where they would push to the summit. She attempted to break in her snow boots and crampons, to learn some basic snow and ice techniques. Her legs had never felt heavier. On the fourth day, still weak from fever and hunger, she attempted the summit climb.
Starting at 1.30 am, in sub-zero temperatures, the group set off into the darkness. The next 12 hours were a blur. She vaguely remembers climbing long snowy slopes, surrounded by white peaks, lifting her heavy crampon-laden feet. One more step, one more step … and finally reaching the gorgeously white, terribly cold summit by 8.42 am. She couldn’t believe she had made it.
“Mount Elbrus transformed me in every sense,” Arpita declares. “To be able to climb to a summit in sub-optimal health … it was crazy.”
Next in her sights were the Aconcagua (6,961 m) and the Ojos del Salado (6,893 m), both in the Andes mountain range in Argentina. “Aconcagua is the second highest in the seven summit series, after Everest,” she says.
In preparation, she completed a month-long Basic Mountaineering Course (BMC) at the National Institute of Mountaineering and Adventure Sports (NIMAS) in Arunachal Pradesh.
“The night I reached there, I was thrown into a large hall with bunk beds and 15 other women,” she recalls. Over the next month, she pushed her body to its limits, going on long hikes and runs, climbing walls, rocks, and glaciers, rappelling through rivers, and finally camping at high altitudes. “It was very tough. There were days when we had to walk for 35 km with a 20 kg rucksack on our backs. Sometimes, the trails were extremely muddy, full of leeches,” she remembers.
But it paid off with a major confidence boost. She finished first among the women in the 8 km mountain race. “We were supposed to finish in one hour. I took 55 minutes!”
Back in Bangalore, her fitness regimen continued. She would wake up at 6 am, eat channa or green moong salad and some fruit, and work out for at least two hours. She rotated between cycling, long-distance running, swimming, strength training, and sometimes badminton. She ended every workout with pranayama.”I’m fortunate to live on campus; I can use all the facilities. I run about 10-21 km in the gymkhana grounds – the new track is very nice.”
With this intense preparation, she hoped that the South American voyage would be a breeze. But the mountains had other plans.
The wind howled like a banshee outside Arpita’s tent. Temperatures plummeted far below zero with fresh snow. Even relieving herself meant a terrifying dash outside, the frigid air stinging her face like needles. At Camp 3 on the Aconcagua mountain, 6,000 m above sea level, this was the highest Arpita had ever been in her life.
This time, she felt more anxious than usual. Her period, arriving five days early, had thrown a wrench in her carefully laid plans. The altitude sickness, the constant threat of frostbite, all felt amplified now.
At 2 am on January 22, 2025, bundled in thick down suits and three layers of footwear and crampons, the group began the 961 m climb to the summit. Hours crawled by as Arpita trudged alone in the dark, ahead of her group.
As the first rays of dawn pierced the gloom, she reached the dreaded West Face, a treacherous traverse across an exposed slope where the winds were strongest. Dizziness crept in. Chocolates and energy drinks offered little relief.
She somehow crossed the traverse and reached La Cueva, the cave where climbers rested before tackling the final, steep section to reach the top. Sheltered from the relentless wind, she checked her watch. It was 11 am. There was still ample time.
She rested for 10 minutes and then took off again. In hindsight, she reckons she should have rested much longer to regain energy and acclimatise better. But she braved on, tackling the steepest part of the ascent now, the last few hundred metres to summit and glory.
Her head felt hollower with every step. She saw the final stretch to the summit, barely 100 m from where she stood. Suddenly, her legs became heavy and unresponsive, refusing to take orders from her brain. A fellow climber was egging her on, but the voice seemed to be coming from another universe. The steep slope loomed above her. A single misstep could send her tumbling down the mountain.
Suddenly, her legs became heavy and unresponsive, refusing to take orders from her brain. A single misstep could send her tumbling down the mountain
Images of her daughter, Aparajita, flashed through her mind. She felt that if she took one more step, she might never see her again. She decided to turn back.
The descent was agonising without the joy of a summit success to fuel her. One group mate walked ahead and one behind her, to catch her if she fell. She just wanted to curl up and sleep.
Her body numb, she finally reached the camp at dusk. Her mind was reeling. “Why can’t you be normal?” she whispered to herself, over and over. “A normal daughter, wife, mother, professor … What the hell are you doing here?” The next morning, she wanted to attempt the summit again. But as the rest of the group was descending, she decided to join them and attempt the summit later in the future.
“I was so, so close to the summit. But at that point, it was about life or death. I had to choose life,” Arpita surmises. She still can’t figure out what went wrong. Was it low blood pressure, AMS or extreme weakness due to periods? “I don’t know what happened.” But there was not much time to deal with disappointment. A week after her return, she was already caught up with organising an international computation workshop to be held at IISc in March. “Where is the time to get depressed?” she says, wryly.
The climb had taught her a valuable lesson. “We shouldn’t take the body for granted. I’m just 40 years old. People are climbing even at 60! There’s a lot of time for me. There’s no reason to be disappointed,” she says.
Her main motivation behind Expedition Aparajita has been to show how women can stand up for themselves and do things beyond what society tells them to. “I always encourage my students to do things outside academia too,” she adds. “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”
Arpita is already planning for her next expedition in the Oceania region. “In May, I’ll steal some days to finish the volcanic summit Mount Giluwe, Papua New Guinea and the summit Mount Kosciuszko, Australia.”
Garnering funds for these expensive expeditions has been a challenge. But she finds the strength to keep going. “I guess that’s the teaching from mountains … the resilience that I have gained to handle grave situations.”
(Edited by Pratibha Gopalakrishna, Ranjini Raghunath)
