Before she ever set foot on a mountain, Nishat Majumdar was already pushing against the tide – running laps through Ramna Park at dawn while strangers on the footpath stared.
Born in 1981 in Ramganj, Laxmipur, Nishat was the second of four children in a modest household. She studied accounting at Dhaka City College, earned her master’s and built a steady career as an accounts officer at Dhaka WASA. By all appearances, a conventional path. But Nishat had always been drawn to the hills, first through adventure stories as a child and then through actual treks in the forests of Bandarban, where the silence and the ridgelines offered something, the city never could.
When Bangladesh made its first Everest summit, she did not cheer from the sidelines. She asked herself a quieter, more dangerous question: why not me? Her family’s response was almost endearing, someone genuinely asked whether Everest was just like going to Bandarban. The concept had no frame of reference in that living room and Nishat was not waiting for one.
She joined the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, trained for nearly a decade, and pieced together funding through her own savings, small sponsorships and the generosity of the local trekking community. No corporate backing, no inherited advantage. Just resolve, compounding slowly into something unstoppable.
On 19th May 2012, she stood on the summit of Mount Everest – the first Bangladeshi woman ever to do so.
She did not stop there. Manaslu, the world’s eighth highest peak, came next. Then came Trek with Nishat, a programme she founded to take young women aged 18 to 25 into the mountains each year, one at a time, holding the door open that she once had to force through herself.
More than a decade on, Nishat Majumdar remains proof that the summit was never the point. The point was showing every girl on the footpath, the ones being laughed at, the ones running anyway that the mountain was always theirs to climb.
