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I can’t quite recall how I ended up teaching primary school students, but it was my first proper job. After completing my intermediate studies in arts from Ratna Rajya Campus in the early 1990s, I was struggling to make ends meet in Kathmandu. My parents had stopped sending me their modest monthly allowance, which barely covered my rent and basic survival.

I must have seen an ad somewhere, which led me to the back alleys of Babarmahal, where an Indian couple had set up a primary school on the ground floor of a three-story building. Strangely enough, as I write this, I’m sitting in a quiet office near the confluence of the Bagmati and Dhobi Khola rivers–close to where it all began.

They hired me to teach English. The principal and his wife were impressed by my English grades. But the stint didn’t last long, and I later heard the school shut down soon after I left.

A few years later, I found myself commuting from my rented room in Thapagaun to Lamatar in Lalitpur district–changing two buses to get there. My friend Kamal Paudel had to leave town for personal reasons, and I was his stand-in at the school. Back then, I was deeply into Bollywood films and sported shoulder-length hair. The headmaster appreciated my teaching, but he asked me to cut my hair. As a young man with a flair for fashion and a fierce sense of freedom, I chose to walk away from my second teaching job.

As my journalism career progressed and later began to stall, I found myself circling back to teaching. Following covid pandemic, freelance journalism opportunities began to dry up. After my stint at a fact-checking organization, I started training journalists on verification and tackling mis- and disinformation. But those gigs were few and far between. 

I had failed to revive my freelance career. In my golden years as a freelance journalist, I always had three stories on the go: one already edited and awaiting publication, another in the reporting stage with an approved pitch, and a third, a solid idea ready to be pitched. But in recent years, my pitches were being regularly rejected, leaving me dejected and crestfallen.

Then, just before Dashain last year, I received an unexpected call from Krishna Niroula, the principal of the Institute of Advanced Communication, Education and Research (IACER) in Kathmandu. He offered me a chance to teach a course to postgraduate students of English literature, filling in for Ujjwal Prasai, who had left for the US to pursue a PhD. Kamal Dev Bhattarai, another friend who taught at IACER, had recommended me for the course.

Fortunately, I wasn’t starting from scratch. Two years ago, I’d been invited as a guest lecturer in the same course. Even better, the course, “Writing in the Digital Age”, had been designed by a friend, Dinesh Kafle. Knowing I could lean on him if I stumbled gave me some confidence. Still, this was a far cry from my Babarmahal days. I was now standing in front of graduate students and the stakes felt higher.

The course was close to my heart. It introduced students to powerful writing, from George Orwell to David Foster Wallace to English translations of essays by Buddhi Sagar and Raju Syangtan. I made a few tweaks to the reading list, adding some of my personal favorites: Pankaj Mishra, Manjushree Thapa, Indra Bahadur Rai, Declan Walsh, Samanth Subramanian and Peter Matthiessen. Their work had helped shape my worldview as a writer; now, I hoped it would inspire my students too.

From day one, it was clear the students came from diverse backgrounds, but most lacked formal training in writing. The course’s goal–teaching someone how to write well–felt at times like chasing the impossible. And yet, there we were, trying.

The curriculum already featured multimedia: a video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” was part of the syllabus. I added an audio interview with David Wolf, editor of Guardian Longreads. Wallace’s essay Consider the Lobster, a meditation disguised as a food review, was a surprise hit among the students.

Someone once said: if you want to learn something, teach it. Over those three months, I reconnected with something I’d been losing: my reading habit. Years of social media scrolling and an endless stream of attention-grabbing videos had dulled my focus. But teaching forced me back to the page.

I tried to pass on the lessons I’d gathered from writers and editors I admire and have learned from a great deal over the two decades of my journalism. In 2008, I spent a memorable week at Poynter Institute in Florida. There, I learned the craft of feature writing from masters like Roy Peter Clark, Chip Scanlan and Tom Huang, who hammered home key principles of good writing: brevity, clarity, the power of a strong nut graf or the main idea of the story, the magic of scene-setting. 

At IACER, “Show, don’t tell” became my classroom mantra. I was delighted when the students began to echo the phrase in their own reflections. I also emphasized the importance of capturing sensory details–the sights, sounds and smells–that bring writing to life.

I also shared my own journey: how I began as a reporter for the now defunct Nepal Weekly magazine in the early 2000s, writing in Nepali, and eventually won an Alfred Friendly Fellowship in the US in 2008 (that’s when I spent a week learning the craft of writing at Poynter). That experience opened new doors–I wrote for Time magazine, then worked for international news agencies like AFP and dpa. I explained how I went on to write for The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Outside, The Caravan and Nikkei Asia.

Standing before the class each week, I felt a quiet sense of fulfillment. Teaching didn’t just pass on the craft–it rekindled my joy in learning it.

Ten climbers from Nepal paused in the winter of 2021 not far from the peak of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, which is located in Pakistan. They huddled and moved forward while humming the national anthem of Nepal ‘Sayaun thunga phulka hami.’ The group of elite Nepali climbers led by Nirmal Purja and Mingma G hailed their historic accomplishment as they reached the icy slope of ‘Savage Mountain’ at an altitude of 8611 meters. This was no ordinary feat. It was considered the pinnacle of climbing to complete a winter expedition on K2, one of the most difficult 8000-meter peaks. In fact, it was the only record that remained to be broken. The Nepali climbers, nine of whom were Sherpas, were eager to take home the last trophy. The majority of the K2 summiteers I spoke with in the spring of 2021 said that their expedition was motivated by the fact that the only remaining record to be broken on K2 was a winter climb. “Foreign climbers currently hold the record on these peaks. But the reality is that it’s not possible for them to climb any of these peaks without help from Sherpas,” one of them told me. Mountaineering doesn’t have a very extensive history. It coincided with the decline of the British Empire. In 1856, Peak XV (later known as Everest) was recognized as the highest mountain in the world. Early in the 20th century, European explorers started venturing into the eastern Himalayas. But after the survey of British India proclaimed the mountain to be the tallest in the world, it took climbers more than a century to achieve their goal of reaching the summit of Everest. Having lost its colonies in Asia and Africa, the British Empire was in retreat. Everest offered them the last frontier. A century ago, British explorers started their quest to conquer what is frequently referred to as the Third Pole. The victory over it became a powerful tool for reinvigorating their sense of national pride. For most of the 20th century, the mountain’s major decisions and rope fixing were mostly made by Western climbers. The Western explorers needed labor in the form of porters, cooks, Sirdars, guides. Before Nepal opened up to foreigners after the end of a century of Rana rule in 1951, expeditions were organized in the Indian mountain town of Darjeeling. Sherpas from Khumbu region flocked to Darjeeling for jobs as porters and cooks. Over the decades until the turn of the century, Sherpas became inevitable in mountaineering. Without them, it’s difficult to climb a mountain higher than 8000 meters. Every year, Sherpas carve out a path in the mountains. Hundreds of climbers use the routes they make up, which they construct using ropes and ladders. For a long time, Sherpas have been treated by Western climbers as a mere footnote in their glory. Despite their heroics, bravery, and skills, it’s the western climber who gets all the attention. The Sherpas are frequently portrayed as faceless people, an insignificant cog in the multi- billion-dollar Everest machine. However, they have recently proven that they are the real heroes and master of mountaineering. How did this community of potato farmers and yak herders who lived beneath the tallest mountains on Earth, become accomplished mountaineers? How do they survive in the harsh, remote terrain that is prone to landslides and other natural disasters? Nepali journalists Pradeep Bashyal and Ankit Babu Adhikari trace the rise of Sherpas in their nonfiction narrative “Sherpa: Stories of Life and Death from the Forgotten Guardians of Everest.” The book features a wide variety of characters, from Tenzing Norgay to Kancha Sherpa, who was a member of the 1953 expedition but was unable to reach the planet’s highest point. There’s Mingma David Sherpa, a brave climber from Taplejung district, who originally intended to travel to Darjeeling, but ended up in Kathmandu (He was a member of the record-setting K2 expedition of 2021). The book also shines light on Sherpas who are not always in the limelight—There’s Phurba Tashi Sherpa, who summited Everest for 21 times, but gave up mountaineering after the death of his parents (although he had always told them that he hadn’t hiked up base camp). Then there is the tale of two women who made it to the summit of Everest after their spouses passed away. For me, Kushang Dorjee’s profile was the most captivating read. The dramatic plot twists and turns make the story read like a novel. Kushang traveled to the mountain country of Bhutan before returning to Darjeeling, where he fell in love with a woman and married her. It has all the makings of a fantastic plot, and the authors craft a compelling story out of it. It’s difficult to write narrative nonfiction. You must hone your narrative skills. You must choose the appropriate characters. To take the readers to the heart of the story, you must travel. Above all, it requires time and effort. The authors have carefully selected the characters for each chapter so that they can tell a mélange of mountain stories. They travel to all three valleys in eastern Nepal—Makalu, Rolwaling and Khumbu—to meet their subjects. The authors let their subjects share their stories at their own pace. On the road, they linger to get all the subtleties. In evocative passages, we learn about the evolution of Sherpas as elite climbers and the culture of these valleys Sherpa people call home. The result is an engaging work of storytelling that adds to the body of work on Everest, which already includes Wade Davis’ ‘Into the Silence’ and Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into Thin Air’. Sherpa is a must-read for those curious about the growing industry of mountaineering and the people who are at the center of it. SHERPA: Stories of Life and Death from the Forgotten Guardians of Everest Pradeep Bashyal & Ankit Babu Adhikari Publisher: Octopus Publishing/Hachette, UK Pages: 321, Paperback Deepak Adhikari covered mountaineering for international news agencies including AFP, DPA. He is currently the editor of NepalCheck.Org, a fact-checking platform