At 8,849 metres above sea level, there is little room for anything except the next step.

On 21 May 2026, as Shradha Gupta stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the world below seemed to disappear. Around her stretched a landscape of snow, ice and distant ridgelines, while the summit itself offered barely enough space to stand. 

After years of balancing boardrooms, client calls and a demanding banking career with early-morning workouts and long weekends in the mountains, the 41-year-old banker from Delhi had finally reached the highest point on Earth.

“I didn't know I was going to Kilimanjaro when I started hiking. When I started Kilimanjaro, I had no idea that I was going to be at Everest,” she tells The Better India.

Perhaps that is what makes her journey remarkable. Everest was not a childhood ambition mapped out over decades. Just three years before standing on its summit, Shradha had only recently rediscovered something she had loved as a child: mountains.

Today, she has climbed five major summits across three continents, including four of the Seven Summits — Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe and Aconcagua in South America — along with Manaslu and Everest in the Himalayas. But for Shradha, the story begins long before the summit photographs.

It begins with a glass table, a long recovery, and a realisation that life had been passing by.

The accident that made her look back

Shradha has spent two decades in banking. Originally from Delhi, she left India at 17 to study engineering in Singapore and eventually joined DBS Bank, beginning her career on the trading floor. She spent 11 years in Singapore before moving to Dubai with the same bank in 2017. Today, she leads corporate business for the Middle East.

For years, work had naturally occupied much of her life. Then, in 2020, an accident at home changed the way she looked at it.

A glass table caused a severe forehead injury that required reconstructive surgery. The bone had broken, muscles had torn, and her doctors had to piece everything together layer by layer. Her recovery took around 18 months.

“The first one to two months was really bad. I couldn't even walk properly because it affected my balance, and it used to hurt all the time,” she recalls.

The experience left her thinking about how close she had come to losing the life she knew. It also made her wonder about everything she had postponed.

“I think for me it ended up just being a life-changing experience," she adds.

"I started thinking about how life had taken over, how work had taken over, and you just keep going year by year, and you forget about the things that are important to you and the ones that give you joy."

One of those things had always been mountains.

Growing up in Delhi, Shradha remembers her parents packing the family into their car during school holidays and heading towards the hills. Nainital, Mussoorie, Pithoragarh, Sangla Valley and other parts of Himachal Pradesh were part of her childhood.

She had even climbed Mount Fuji with her parents as a teenager and later hiked in Malaysia while studying in Singapore. But a long gap passed before she returned to the mountains.

That changed in February 2022.

From weekend hikes........

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