Article on Mt Kilimanjaro summit ..1
| Hearts beat for India, five head honchos unfurl Tricolour on Mt Kilimanjaro | ||||
| Pune-based management trainer conceived the exercise that combined patriotism with management lessons | ||||
| Sunanda Mehta | ||||
| Pune, August 21: If Kavita Gadgil, founder of Abhijeet Air Safety Foundation, unfurled a replica of the first tricolour hoisted by freedom fighter Madame Bhikaiji Cama in Stuttgart University, Germany this Independence Day to commemorate 60 years of Independence, five head honchos from Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore and Nellore climbed up the snow-covered Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to do the same on August 15. The feat was no ordinary achievement. For, barring one, none of the climbers were professional mountaineers for whom the only peaks till now were the kinds that displayed their company’s performance chart.
“Being a leader is all about taking risks and pushing the limits. Which is why this kind of an expedition was planned in the first place for corporate bosses. We timed it for August 15 to make it even more special and purposeful,’’ said managing director of Pune-based Empowered Learning Systems Pvt Ltd. K Jayshankar who conceived the idea and took part in the expedition himself. The other four were managing director of Teekay Group Umar Teekay from Bangalore, chief operating officer of Adventity.com, Ulhas Deshpande from Mumbai, chief information security officer of Centurion Bank P Shreenath from Mumbai and accomplished mountaineer Malli Masthan Babu from Nellore who led the expedition. They flew to Africa from Mumbai on August 8 and started the ascent to the 15,000 feet summit two days later. “The first two days were like a picnic as we took in the picturesque surroundings, the third day’s climb was moderately difficult and till the sixth day it was unbelievably tough. We went through all kinds of landscapes-thick forests, harsh sun and finally icy cold winds and snow,’’ said fortynine-year-old Teekay who prepared for the climb by trekking up the smaller hills around Bangalore a month before the expedition. “Climbing Kilimanjaro was completely different. We would be climbing at a gradient of 45 to 70 degrees for nine hours a day and there were many times when at least one person wanted to give up,’’ added Deshpande (47) who has unforgettable memories of the night they spent on August 14, just a few feet away from the summit. “We were inside a volcanic crater, next to a glacier with the temperature down to minus 10 degrees Celsius. It was the most critical night we spent,’’ he said. But all the hardships faded away as the group set out early the next morning and at 7.48 am unfurled the Tricolour atop Kilimanjaro. “It was a real high,’’ confessed P Shreenath (46). “This expedition called for immense physical endurance and mental determination. Though the team had all of this, the huge motivation was the national flag we were carrying,” said Babu. Along the way, they picked up management lessons from team work to persistence to focus. “In Swahili, they say Poley, poley—meaning steadily, steadily, a deviation from our slow and steady philosophy. I realised it’s also more effective and it certainly helped us,’’ said Teekay. http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=252123 | ||||
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