Narendra Dhar Jayal - Career

Career

In 1948, Nandu Jayal went to Switzerland and acquired a Ski Teacher's Certificate, a very respectable achievement. He was appointed Chief Instructor at the Winter Warfare School, later known as the High Altitude and Winter Warfare School.

Under the leadership of the Engineer-in-Chief, Maj. Gen. Harold 'Bill' Williams, himself an eager climber, Nandu Jayal organised the first Sappers expedition to Bandarpunch successfully in 1950. As a young Captain in 1950-51, he carried out a strategic reconnaissance of the Garhwal Himalayas and was later the Indian Army liaison officer for the French Expedition to Nanda Devi in 1951. He organised and led two expeditions to Kamet; the first in 1952 when the summit team was forced back by a blizzard from just 600 metres short of the mountain and later in 1955 when he summitted - at that point of time, it was the highest that an Indian had climbed.

Major Jayal was the founder principal of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute at Darjeeling, with Tenzing Norgay of Everest fame as the Chief Instructor. Both of them were invited by the Swiss Government to Switzerland where they spent three months seeing new things and having new experiences. Maj Jayal was became the only non-Swiss to win the coveted Swiss Guide's Diploma and Badge. Jayal led the 1955 Kamet expedition as the Director HMI.

Maj Jayal organised an expedition to Nanda Devi in 1957. Bad weather thwarted the expedition but Jayal, never one to give up, went next to the Karakoram where he conquered Saken (24,130 ft) and Sakang (24,150 ft), the third highest peak in the Karakoram range.

Read more about this topic:  Narendra Dhar Jayal

Famous quotes containing the word career:

    John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)