School Days
Jayal began his mountaineering career while he was a student at The Doon School, where his teachers encouraged his interest in climbing as a way to tame his somewhat unruly nature.
Jayal's first major expedition as a 16-year old schoolboy was to the Awar Valley above Badrinath, reaching 6,000 meters. Other climbs, while still at Doon, included Trisul with Gurdial Singh, a teacher from Doon. While Singh went on to reach the peak of Trisul, where he performed a headstand asana to honor the Hindu god Shiva, Jayal noted his own feelings in lyrical terms: "The grass on which we camped was like a cushion sprinkled with tiny mauve primula and the gentle lapping of the running water recalled melodies from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. I confess a desire to bring my efforts to an honourable conclusion here – as long as somebody got to the top – and revel in this bracing and saner altitude."
It was a remarkable transformation of Doon's most delinquent boy who had became a "gentle, perfect knight"
Read more about this topic: Narendra Dhar Jayal
Famous quotes related to school days:
“After school days are over, the girls ... find no natural connection between their school life and the new one on which they enter, and are apt to be aimless, if not listless, needing external stimulus, and finding it only prepared for them, it may be, in some form of social excitement. ...girls after leaving school need intellectual interests, well regulated and not encroaching on home duties.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)