Keval Kakka was a 17-year-old student of automobile engineering, sitting in his college canteen sipping tea with his friends, when he realised he was doing it all wrong. This wasn’t the path he was meant to be on. He was meant to be a mountaineer.

It was an unusual calling for a boy from Mumbai. But as he and his friends talked about what they were looking forward to most, he couldn’t see it any other way. Some talked about wanting to work with a particular car giant, others talked about wanting to study further. When they turned to him, he remembers saying, “I want to be in the mountains.”

Soon after that day in the canteen, he announced to his family that he was dropping out. He couldn’t take the idea of sitting at an endless series of desks.

“Had I finished the degree, I would have jumped into a regular job. I had already found joy in the mountains. I wanted to explore that further,” Kakka says. “It wasn’t conventional and I didn’t know anybody who had made a career of it. But the only way to learn more was to take the first step towards what I wanted.”

Kakka had grown up spending summers in the Himalayas. His father Hiren Kakka, a businessman, had introduced him to high-altitude treks early on. The deep connection with nature that he felt on those walks, “the sounds as well as the solitude”, felt like something he wanted to build his life around.

Kakka, 34, has done exactly that. And recently, he made history of a kind. He is now the first Indian to have scaled eight of the world’s fourteen 8,000-metre-plus peaks. (Two other Indians, Arjun Vajpai and Bharath Thammineni, have come close, reaching the eight-summit mark, but with climbs that required rescue attempts.)

Kakka reached his milestone with a summit of Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain, and a peak that had tested him severely before.

In his first attempt, in 2022, severe frostbite and a broken toenail meant he had to retreat, just 100 metres from the top. Back at ground level, it turned out he needed a partial amputation of the toe, a procedure from which it took him four months to recover.

“The mountains are my school. They are where I shape myself as a human being. Each time I go to them, I gain something new. The syllabus is vast, and you can proceed at a pace you are comfortable with,” he says. Then again, make a mistake and the mountains will fail you and force you back down, he adds laughing.

***

Perhaps his greatest lesson, Kakka says, has been that ambition must coexist with humility.

“The mountain is no place to satisfy one’s ego,” he adds. One can plan, prepare, train. But eventually, as with so much of life, how the road unfolds is forever beyond one’s control.

In the motivational lectures and TEDx talks that he is now invited to deliver, from time to time, he uses this principle as the basis of what has become a core belief: that mountaineering is really just life, taken to its extreme.

His Everest happened to be Everest, he says, but everyone has a mountain they hope to climb, and everyone knows the sense of fear, self-doubt and uncertainty that can keep them from chasing that big dream.

We are too afraid… of danger, of death, of discomfort, Kakka says. “The truth is that, to scale any new peak, you have to know how to fail.”

Do the research. Acknowledge the risks. Feel the fear. Just don’t let it take over.

He knows, for instance, that he risks death each time he begins to climb an 8000er. He knows the storms he faces on these peaks are like nothing most humans will ever know. But being too afraid to face such a storm… that is scarier to him, he says.

“Death is inevitable. What do you want to do while you’re here? What fears are you willing to face? What are you willing to lose?”

***

Of course, losing is not the goal. Learning is.

“Be a good observer, because there are lessons all around,” Kakka says.

He began training in the Sahyadris, after that day in the canteen in 2008, learning how to support his body through increasingly strenuous climbs. He didn’t make his first Himalayan ascent until 2016. He was 25 that year, when bad weather left him stranded at 6,200 metres for three days, on the mountain of Kun in Ladakh.

It was his first lesson in setbacks, patience and survival, he says.

The following year, he summited his first 8,000er, Manaslu, in Nepal. The year after that, Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world, on the Nepal-Tibet border. He scaled this one without the help of a high-altitude guide.

He learnt on these climbs that he really did flourish at high altitudes, in his own company, the exhaustion of the day rewarded with unbelievable sunrises and spectacular snowscapes.

In order to continue evolving as a mountaineer, in 2019, he completed a double ascent of Everest and its neighbour, Lhotse, summiting both over six days. He won the Tenzing Norgay award after that feat, a prize handed out by the President.

Then came Annapurna I, Dhaulagiri and Makalu, between 2021 and 2023.

***

Fear is still the first thing he feels when he begins each climb, he says. But exhilaration is the other. The promise of a new peak looms ahead of him, as he goes about his daily routine, running his outdoor-equipment store in Mumbai and leading trekking groups around the Sahyadris.

He isn’t trying to glorify the danger, he adds. The goal is to come back down; to plan and prepare and proceed so carefully, that one does not die in one’s youth but rather lives well past the age at which climbing is possible.

“This is not a battlefield where you have to give your everything,” Kakka says. “The aim is to reach the peak with enough reserves to walk back down to base camp. That’s success.”

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