However well-travelled you may be, this is not what you would easily spot in a budget hotel or a city guesthouse. A 40-foot rock climbing wall with the latest holds, rising from the lobby to the roof! And a museum with displays reflecting a country’s mountaineering history.
Folks, welcome to Legend Inn, a budget hotel in South Delhi, where once mountaineering greats like Tenzing Norgay, Edmund Hillary, Chris Bonington and others stayed on visits to Delhi. If you know whose brainchild is this four-storey building in East of Kailash, you would hardly be surprised. For those who came in after Legend Inn was established in 1994 and won the media sobriquet ‘Little Himalayas in Delhi’, it is the creation of Captain (retd.) Manmohan Singh Kohli, the Indian Navy officer who led India’s maiden climb to Mount Everest in 1965.
Kohli, a Padma Bhushan and Arjuna awardee, was also a part of the RAW-CIA secret plan to place a permanent electronic surveillance device atop Nanda Devi to snoop on China under the cover of a mountaineering expedition in the pre-satellite days of 1965, an account of which he along with Kenneth Conboy famously put between the covers of “Spies in the Himalayas” in 2003.
Kohli is 84 now; his aged body has however clearly not been able to tame his heart, his memory. At his office in Legend Inn, Kohli effortlessly reels back to 1965, a year that was as important for him as for India’s history.
“The successful climb to Everest in 1965 was one of the biggest achievements of India after Independence. In fact, 1965 was an important year not just from the mountaineering point of view but also regarding India’s foreign policy vis-a-vis the Cold War. Immediately after Everest, we were asked to join the India-U.S. secret mission to launch a device atop Nanda Devi as both these countries were worried about the growing nuclear power of China. The atom bomb was already exploded by China, so they wanted to know where from China was launching the missile,” he recalls.
Kohli was chosen to lead the mission. He remembers being “whisked away to Alaska suddenly”. He says, “We brought from the U.S. a 5-pound plutonium capsule which we put on top of the mountain but a blizzard knocked us off. We never found the capsule after that.” It is thought provoking when he says, “The life of that capsule is 900 years and only 50 years have roughly passed by. It means the radioactive surveillance equipment will keep ticking somewhere in India for the next 850 years, which should be a point of worry.” Kohli says, “Pakistanis parachuted down on Nanda Devi to check on us and some of them were caught too…. India and Pakistan were war-drawn then…India was planning to occupy Lahore on September 7 that year. The whole thing was foiled after the Pakistani Army got a whiff of it.”
“Spies in the Himalayas” tried to capture this thriller-like tale. The book is now out of print, he says. A Hollywood producer turned it into a film script soon after its publication in America. “But he couldn’t generate the funds.” Recently, “the makers of Madras Café and Vicky Donor have got in touch to turn it into a film.”
With 2015 upon us, Kohli is excited about India’s nine-member team expedition to Everest rounding off 50 years. There is a grand plan afoot, he says. “We will have a big event in India but also in Kathmandu as our team also included a Nepali citizen, one of the first from Nepal to climb Everest.” Through his organisation Himalayan Environment Trust, he is in constant touch with world mountaineers. “For 25 years, as the manager of Himalayan tourism for Air India, I sold the Himalayas to the world, introduced trekking to the base camp. So for the next 25 years after retirement, I have tried to save the Himalayas,” he says with a laugh.
More you talk to Kohli, more you realise that India’s mountaineering history is closely braided to his growth as a mountaineer, and as a devotee of the Himalayas. Kohli was instrumental in letting women get into mountaineering in India. “During an IHM meeting, I told Nehru (he was the Chairman of IHM then) that many girls have been asking why we don’t allow women in mountaineering. Nehru said, we must. So we started the first course for girls in Darjeeling. On May 24, 1962, all 24 girls passed the course while many in the men’s course quit in between.”
The rock climbing wall in Legend Inn is India’s first indoor climbing wall. A year before that, in 1993, during his IMF presidentship, the first outdoor wall was launched at the IMF headquarters in Delhi.
Through the climbing wall in Legend Inn, he wanted “to show the world an example of a hotel with adventure at its core.” The “world” he is referring to was about to land up in Delhi for the Asian Games. The Government was looking for private houses for tourists’ accommodation. By the time he completed building on his one-storey house, the Games were long over. When it opened in 1994, it however got noticed and till today remains a unique feature of Delhi. “Initially, DU hiking club members came to climb the wall. Now, we get school children who climb it under expert guidance plus a walk-through the mountaineering museum and a lecture by my son and the Secretary of Mountaineering Club of Delhi, Maninder Singh.”
The museum, among other things, has the precious ice axes and oxygen canisters used in 1965. It also documents the two failed attempts at climbing Everest by India, in 1960 and 1962. “In 1962, we were just 200 metres from the summit. We could have reached it but couldn’t have returned home alive,” he says. The museum also has photographs of Kohli-led India’s first ascent of Nanda Kot and the Annapurna III. Not to forget, the grand Ocean to Sky boat expedition with Edmund Hillary.
It also has personal noting like how Kohli and his family were saved during Partition by the family of former Pakistan President Ayub Khan. Kohli is reflective here, says, “In my life everything happened as a part of destiny. I am accidental Captain Kohli. Many things have worked out because I seized the opportunity.”
What he says thereafter is worth pondering. “People might ask what did Kohli and his team do, even a 13-year-old is climbing Everest now. In the ’60s, we had to spend over a month creating a route and maintain it, had to put 50 ladders on the crevices. Now there is a rope from the base camp to the summit available for a fee and you have to be in a queue. I wonder where the adventure is now.”
