It was April 27, 2011. the 11th day of our largest group trek.
At 4 am, outside the lodge at Lobuche, everything was white. Snow had fallen through the night and covered the trail we were about to walk—the trail that would take us to Everest Base Camp, 5,364 meters above sea level, at the foot of the world’s highest mountain.
My wife Anu looked at me and said she wasn’t sure she could walk today.
Period cramps. Bad ones. The kind that would have kept her in bed at home without a second thought.
I didn’t say anything immediately. Because what was there to say?
It was our second wedding anniversary. We had set this date (April 27) a year earlier. Not for a restaurant or a weekend away. For this. For the base of Everest. She had walked eleven days to be in this room, in this dark, on this morning.
She got up. She said she’d walk slow. But she’d walk.
Twenty-seven other people were pulling on their boots in the same cold dark. Together, we were twenty-nine—the largest group trek to Everest Base Camp that the Nepal trekking organizer had ever handled.
This is the story of how that happened. And what it gave all of us.
It Started With a Broken Back
Eight months before that morning in Lobuche, I could barely walk.
Three bulging discs—L2, L3, and L5. The doctor said rest. My body agreed loudly every time I tried otherwise. I was running Adventurizants, the internal trek group at Cognizant, and had been taking people outdoors for years. Now I sat at my desk instead of walking during breaks. I came home and lay down instead of going out.
So I read.
Trekking blogs. Every evening, sometimes whole afternoons. Routes in Ladakh, passes in Himachal, places I had done, and places I hadn’t. Then one afternoon I found an article about Everest Base Camp.
5,364 meters. Eighteen days of walking. A flight into one of the scariest airports in the world to begin with.
Anu and I had already been married a year. Our second anniversary was coming up on April 27, 2011. I opened a notepad and started counting days. If we left Pune in mid-April, flew to Kathmandu, flew to Lukla, and walked at a proper acclimatization pace—I counted forward, then backward, then forward again.
April 27 landed on the Base Camp day.
I kept counting. I wanted to start on a Saturday—no point burning a weekend day on travel. The dates landed on April 16, a Saturday. Which meant three weekends built into the trek naturally. May 1st—Labour Day—fell inside the itinerary. For an eighteen-day trek, the group would need only eleven days of annual leave.
The math hadn’t just worked. It had worked too precisely to feel like coincidence.
I picked up the phone and called Nepal.
The Email That Changed Everything
In July 2010, I sent one email to the Cognizant ALL distribution list — every employee, every designation, every city.
Adventurizants is organizing a trek to Everest Base Camp. Summit day: April 27. If you’re interested, write back.
The next morning, more than ten replies were waiting. The morning after that, more than ten again. Every designation was in there—junior engineers one year into their careers, project managers mid-life, and senior people whose names I recognized from org charts and all-hands meetings.
Twenty-seven people eventually said yes.
One of them was Krish Venkat—VP-Academy at Cognizant, head of the entire Learning and Development practice, forty-six years old, and the first to admit he was probably the most unfit person who had responded to my email. We had long conversations. I told him a year was enough time to get ready. He trusted me. He signed up. He spent the next twelve months walking, running, and training with his colleague Nandu — building not just fitness but the particular trust that comes from shared early mornings on Chennai streets.
One of them was Suman Punuru—an associate five years into his career, from Nellore, who read a book on a train from Chennai to his hometown and decided first and explained to his parents afterward, then took a personal loan to pay the registration fee because the decision had already been made before the money question arose.
One of them was Ashish Gaonkar, a marathon runner and the fittest person on the largest group trek, whose birthday fell on April 16, the exact day we flew to Kathmandu.
Twenty-seven strangers. One anniversary. One mountain.
What the Mountain Does That Offices Never Can
The Everest Base Camp group trek from India is not technically difficult by mountaineering standards. There is no climbing, no ropes, no equipment beyond what any reasonably fit person can carry. What it requires — what it takes from you quietly across twelve days at altitude — is harder to name.
By the time we reached Namche Bazaar at 3,440 meters, the org chart had already started to dissolve. Not because anyone decided it should. Because altitude does not care what your designation is. Because when you are gasping on a steep climb after lunch and the person who stops to wait for you is the person who was three levels below you at work, something shifts that no team-building exercise has ever managed to shift.
At Machhermo, 4,470 meters, Ashish—the marathon runner, the fittest person on the largest group trek—collapsed during a talk about altitude sickness. He was ported down. Two others stayed back at a lower settlement. The rest of us gathered in a lodge and had a two-hour argument about whether to continue the original route via Gokyo Lake and Chola Pass or take the safer classic route to Base Camp.
It was the most corporate meeting I had attended in years—except it was at 4,470 meters and everyone was slightly oxygen-deprived.
When the room went quiet, I asked one question.
What did we all come for? What is the priority — EBC, or the route to EBC?
The answer came quickly. EBC. That was why everyone was here. Everything else was secondary.
Our trek leader Rabin spread a map on the table and showed us the route. We changed the plan. We descended to recover. We regrouped — all twenty-nine of us, including the ones who had been held back by their bodies — and walked on together.
That decision was made by a group that had been strangers three weeks earlier. It produced the outcome that everyone, including the people who argued against it, agreed was right.
No facilitator. No framework. Just altitude and honesty and one quiet question.
The Largest Group Trek That Changed Everything
There are many moments from those eighteen days that I carry.
Suman caught snowflakes at 3,880 meters—the first snowfall of his life—while I stood nearby knowing what it had cost him to be standing in it.
Krish Venkat stopped on the Namche ridge—while everyone else stared at Everest in full glory—to pull out his diary and write about the person who had used the trail as a bathroom with a direct view of the summit, calling that stranger “the luckiest man alive.”
The afternoon at Dingboche, 4,410 meters, when someone suggested Antakshari and twenty-eight people—VPs and junior engineers and marathon runners and the man who hadn’t bathed since Namche—sat on the floor of a mountain lodge and played. Nobody had a designation that afternoon. Nobody needed one.
And then April 27. The anniversary morning.
The trail from Gorak Shep to Base Camp in melting snow, the sound of avalanches rolling through the valley, Anu walking slow behind me, Venkat walking steady near the back. Two and a half hours of careful walking over loose gravel and slush. And then the tents. Yellow, orange, and red. The glacier. Lhotse and Nuptse overhead. And twenty-nine people arriving one by one, the fatigue gone from their faces, replaced by something that is not quite joy and not quite pride and not quite relief but contains all three.
We stood together.
Someone said, “Let’s sing.”
We sang Jana Gana Mana at 5,364 meters. Not in unison. Not polished. But genuine—the specific genuineness of people who have carried something of their country to a significant place and are acknowledging it together.
The Nepal organizer was right. It was the largest group trek to Everest Base Camp he had handled.
Every single one of us reached it.
What the Mountain Left Behind
Fifteen years have passed since that morning.
Krish Venkat left Cognizant in 2016 after twenty-one years. He started a company called Prayojana Golden Years Services—elderly care in Chennai. “Prayojana” means “purpose” in Sanskrit. He posts on LinkedIn about new walking shoes. The man who couldn’t walk twenty-five minutes a day is still walking.
Suman Punuru is a Senior Manager at Cognizant, nearly twenty years at the same company. He bought a new copy of Chicken Soup for Travelers in Canada — the same book he read on a train that gave him permission to take the loan. It’s on his shelf.
I left corporate life after twenty-two years. Built Pause and Arrive. Moved to Dehradun. Started running — inspired by Ashish, who made it look like something a person simply does.
Every April 27, I tell Anu: X years ago today, we were there.
She always knows.
Why I’m Writing This Book Now — 15 Years Later
I have been wanting to write this story for fifteen years. Something always took priority. This year felt different.
I moved to Dehradun. The hills do something to memory. And the 15th anniversary arriving on the horizon felt like a deadline the mountain itself had set.
So I wrote it.
All 29 is a narrative non-fiction book about what happens to twenty-eight people—colleagues, strangers, and friends—when you take them to one of the most demanding places on earth and strip away everything the office gave them.
Not an adventure book. Not a trekking guide.
A book about belonging. About commitment. About what the mountain does to people that boardrooms never can.
The book is written. It is coming.
If you want to know when it launches, subscribe here. You’ll be the first to hear.
And if you’ve ever stood at the base of something that frightened you and chosen to keep walking, this book is for you too.
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