Santosh Yadav

#21/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Santosh Yadav is an Indian mountaineer. She is the first woman in the world to climb Mt. Everest twice, and the first woman to successfully climb Mt. Everest from Kangshung Face. She first climbed the peak in May 1992 and then did it again in May 1993. During her Everest mission of 1992 she saved the life of another climber, Mohan Singh, by sharing oxygen with him.

She comes from an affluent family of Joniyawas village in Rewari District, Haryana state, India, and has five older brothers. Her father served in the Indian Army for some time. She studied in a local Hindi medium school in her village till tenth grade. A lot of people ask her whether she was a victim of a gender bias, because her brothers studied in English medium schools while staying in hostels in nearby cities. She tells them, “When I grew up in the seventies, it was not very common to send girls away to study on their own, so my father made the best possible choice under the circumstances. My parents adored me. My parents raised me with a lot of love and affection. Why should I insult them by disregarding all their love and judging them on the basis of this one decision? My parents did send me to study in Jaipur when I finished my high school. They even bowed down to my decision that I would consider marriage only after completing graduation. Yes, I did have to put in extra efforts to learn English, but I took it as a challenge, not a setback. Studying in an Hindi medium school never stopped me from doing anything that I wanted to do, in fact, it kept me connected to my culture, my people, my land.”

She attended Maharani College in Jaipur. The hostel was facing the Aravallis and she was able to see mountaineers from her room. She was inspired by this to join Uttarkashi's Nehru Institute of Mountaineering. While studying she prepared herself to climb two greatest peaks in her life, namely, mountaineering and Indian Civil Services and was successful in both. She prepared for her Indian Administrative Service (IAS) exams in a hostel provided by Indian Mountaineering Federation at Connaught Place, New Delhi. 

When she landed up at the institute, she was thin, underweight and had low lung capacity. All the instructors thought she would never make it. They thought she would opt out of the course within a few days. Not only did she manage to finish the course, she managed to top her batch. There were girls far stronger than her physically who did the course along with her, but she managed to top it because she had no expectations. She had come simply to be in the Himalayas. She did not want to prove anything to anyone. Interestingly, her lungs were small and climbing is all about lung capacity. In her own words, “The doctors at the institute were surprised to see that despite the small size of my lungs, my oxygen saturation levels were really good. I was used to leading a very healthy lifestyle. I did yoga. I prayed. I chanted. I meditated daily, and I had a very a balanced outlook towards life. That was the time I realised that there is a very strong connect between the body and the mind and a strong grounding in spirituality helps to cement that connection.”

After that she never looked back. She was hooked onto the Himalayas. Aged 20 in 1992, she scaled the Everest, becoming the youngest woman in the world to achieve this feat. Within twelve months, she became a member of an Indo-Nepalese Women's expedition, and scaled Everest the second time, thus setting the record as the only woman to have scaled the Everest twice. She answered an exam and got selected for Indo-Tibetan Border Force. While serving at ITBP, she became a professional mountaineer. She served as an officer in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. She was part of the nine-nation international climbing camp-cum-expedition to Nun Kun in 1989. In 1999, Santosh Yadav led an Indian mountaineering expedition to Kangshung Face, Everest. In 2001, she led mountaineering team to East Face, Mt. Everest.

She quit her job when she was expecting her kids. She wanted to devote the next few years of her life to raise her kids, the way her mother did. She now lives in Haryana Sadan as her children go to school in Delhi: a son aged 11 years and a daughter aged 13 years. She often travels around the country to give lectures on leadership and team-building at various educational institutions, but she always travels with her kids. She now runs holiday camps for school children in a village near Manali during school vacations. She teaches Moutaineering but it is just a medium. She actually teaches the children many things, how to take care of their health, how to take care of the ecology, yoga, spirituality, how mountain climbing is a form of meditation. She believes, “You cannot separate the Himalayas from Hindu Dharma and spirituality. The only way to preserve the Himalayas is to preserve our faith, our culture, our spiritual traditions.” 

Santosh Yadav was awarded the Padma Shri in 2000. She says, “I firmly believe that all of us have a choice at any given point of time, no matter how bleak our circumstances are. We can either surrender to the circumstances and play the victim for the rest of our lives, or we can accept the circumstances as a challenge and try to overcome them. All my life, I have made my own choices, whether it is climbing the highest mountain in the world or choosing to put raising my children first, above all other priorities. My attire, my career, my decision to quit it, every decision has been a result of a conscious choice.” 

Source: A recently viral Facebook post and Wikipedia.