Why do men climb mountains? For one of our readers, Ravichandran Manikam Achari, the answer was to change his perspective on life. The 63-year-old remembers being hit by a perfect storm in his engineering solutions business in 2013, when three of his biggest clients were individually affected by various changes and could not honour their purchase agreements with his company.
It was then when he met someone who told him to climb Mount Everest instead of worrying about the business because climbing the mountains would give him an entirely new perspective on life. Thus, with that encouragement, Manikam decided to attempt Gokyo (4,790m) in 2015, progressively building his stamina, mountaineering prowess, and altitude tolerance.
In time, the wisdom of his friend revealed its quiet truth. “As I pushed myself toward the summit, my focus narrowed to nothing but the climb: the silence, the wind, the sheer drop beneath me,” Manikam recalls. “One misstep and it could’ve all ended. In that moment, it wasn’t success or status that I thought of—it was the people who’ve been there through it all. My wife, my family, my friends—the ones who’ve walked with me through life’s roughest trails. That near stillness, that pause above the world, reminded me of life’s fragility and the priceless value of genuine connection over material gain.”
From there, he would then make it to Everest Base Camp (5,364m) and back again three times, always improving on his time. “I was reducing the six-hour trail trek to three and getting faster even as I was getting older,” he says. For Manikam, the training that he undertook, and the actual climbing, gave him clarity in his work. “I felt very much confident in whatever I did and business was picking up even as I took a lot of risks.”
Back at the Himalayan range, Manikam decided to tackle the mountain passes, going up 5,000m and then scaling back down 1,000m before heading back up, clearing the Renjo, Cho La and Gokyo Ri passes through thick ice and snow while using a variety of climbing gear. By 2023, he had summited Island Peak (6,165m), marking the first time he broke the 6,000m threshold. The summit attempt was made at around midnight with a head torch, alternating between walking and climbing with his Sherpa who advised him not to look behind. The one time he did, to change his crampons, what he thought were fireflies were actually the flickering lights of the camp they had departed from.
Finally, earlier this year, on the last day of March, Manikam cleared 7,000m when he summited Himlung Himal (7,126m), following a 15-month training regime that totalled 486km of trail runs, 1,300km of cycling, and cumulatively lifting 1.2 million kilograms of weights.
“The rush doesn’t hit you when you summit—because you’re at -20°C and your blood oxygen level is at 75 per cent or so,” Manikam says. “But, somehow, you learn to breathe. You take your own pace and you make sure you continue to stay hydrated to prevent acute mountain sickness,” he says. “When I finally got back to camp, I hugged my Sherpas for guiding me and I became very emotional, realising that I didn’t just make the summit, but that I also made it back down—and that’s the bigger thing.”
