Source – www.facebook.com
Shivangi Pathak, a 16-year-old teenager from Haryana’s Hisar district has become the youngest Indian to summit Mount Everest. Along with her team of climbers, she started her journey to Everest Base Camp on the 6th of April, and after a month-long expedition, reached the top of the mountain on the 17th of May.
Pathak, who turns 17 in two months, is back in Nepal’s capital with a special message for women all around the world. Speaking to ANI, she said, “They (women) can achieve anything if they desire. If I can make it, if Arunima Sinha can summit Mount Everest, then they can do anything”. Arunima Sinha, being the first Indian amputee to climb Mount Everest has been a huge inspiration for her. She says, “When I was 15 years old, I had gone to a seminar with my mother and I watched a biopic on Arunima Sinha there. At that time, I was carefree and after watching the biopic I felt like, if she is able to make it then I also can do it.” She later enrolled herself in Delhi’s Jawahar Institute of Mountain and completed her basic and advance course in Mountaineering. She has already successfully climbed Stok Khangri, a 6,053-meter peak in Ladakh.
On having achieved such a tremendous feat, she received a lot of praise. Our Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi called her accomplishment ‘stupendous’ and congratulated her.
Climbing Mount Everest was her childhood dream, said Pathak in one of her interviews. Now that she has fulfilled it, she wants to concentrate on her studies. “Education is most important for now and there will be nothing, without education there will be no use of the counted expeditions which I make. So, I will continue my studies along with mountaineering”, says Pathak, who one day wishes to conquer every mountain on this planet.