“I wanted to take Tripura higher – literally and metaphorically.”

When most people say they’re balancing work and fitness, they usually mean a jog after work or squeezing in a yoga session before a client call. But for 30-year-old Aritra Roy, a software engineer with Tata Consultancy Services, Bengaluru, the word “balance” meant something far more ambitious: cycling from Agartala to Nepal, scaling Mount Everest, and finishing off with the world’s highest-altitude marathon, all while working a corporate job.

In May 2024, Aritra became the first person from Tripura to summit Mount Everest, completing a self-conceived “triathlon to the top”; a feat that fused his passion for endurance sports, sustainability, and his deep-rooted pride in representing the Northeast.

In conversation with The Better India, he shares that his story isn’t of a full-time athlete or a sponsored adventurer. It’s about a regular middle-class techie who turned his 9-to-5 job into a stepping stone rather than an obstacle. He didn’t quit his job. He didn’t get big funding. But he did get a vision and the sheer will to follow through.

A random scroll that led to Everest

Growing up in Agartala, Aritra never thought of becoming a mountaineer. “Adventure sports weren’t even a thing in Tripura. We didn’t have exposure or access,” he shares. But what he did have was an innate drive for physical activity. Running, cycling, swimming, he embraced them all as part of daily life, especially post-2020 when the COVID-19 waves spurred him into long-distance training.

“I was regularly participating in marathons, open-water swimming events, triathlons. Somewhere along the way, I got fascinated by the idea of human endurance,” he tells The Better India.

The seed for Everest, though, was planted during a random scroll on the internet. “I came across a Swedish athlete who cycled all the way to Nepal, climbed Everest, and then cycled back. That image just stayed with me. I thought if he can do it, why not someone from India? Why not someone from Tripura?”

That question slowly transformed into a mission. Not only would he climb Everest, but he’d also cycle to Nepal and finish off with the Tenzing-Hillary Everest Marathon held every year on May 29, commemorating the first successful summit by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.

“I wanted the whole journey to be land-based and low-carbon. Adventure doesn’t have to leave a large footprint,” Aritra adds.

On the wheels for 21 days, covering 1,200 km

On 16 March 2024, Aritra took his first pedal stroke from Agartala,........

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