When Your Banker Says She's "Stepping Out of the Office," She Means It
In the high-stakes world of corporate banking, the phrase "climbing the ladder" is usually metaphorical. For Shradha Gupta, Head of Corporate Business at DBS Bank Middle East, it turned out to be distressingly literal.Gupta has successfully summited Mount Everest — all 8,849 metres of it — proving once and for all that when Dubai's banking community says someone is "high-performing," they may need to start specifying whether they mean quarterly targets or altitude.
The ascent was completed with Elite Expeditions, the outfit run by record-holder Nirmal Purja, which presumably has a better safety record than most investment products sold to retail customers in 2008.
A Meteoric Rise. Literally.
What makes Gupta's story either deeply inspiring or deeply inconvenient for the rest of us is the timeline. She began serious mountaineering roughly three years ago — after the pandemic, when most professionals were perfecting sourdough or aggressively redecorating their living rooms. While others were buying Pelotons they would eventually use as expensive coat racks, Gupta was quietly building a mountaineering CV that now reads like a geography teacher's bucket list.
Mount Kilimanjaro. Mount Elbrus. Aconcagua. Mount Manaslu last September. And now Everest.
For context: most mountaineers spend a decade working up to Everest. Gupta, apparently, had a more aggressive growth strategy in mind.
The Death Zone Has Nothing on a Monday Morning at DBS
Everest's infamous "death zone" — the altitude above 8,000 metres where oxygen drops to a third of sea-level concentration and the human body begins to deteriorate — sounds alarming. Though anyone who has sat through a four-hour budget review call on a Friday afternoon will note that physiological deterioration under pressure is not entirely unfamiliar territory in corporate life either.
The difference, of course, is that on Everest, the suffering is optional.
Gupta, to her considerable credit, balanced months of gruelling acclimatisation and expedition prep alongside a senior leadership role at one of Asia's most respected banks. How she managed her inbox during base camp rotations is a question her colleagues are probably too polite — or too intimidated — to ask.
From Singapore Engineering Grad to the Roof of the World
Gupta began her career at DBS Bank in Singapore in 2006, armed with an engineering degree from the National University of Singapore. Twenty years later, she is heading the bank's Corporate business across the Middle East and, in her spare time, standing on the highest point on the planet.
Her professional progression — Singapore to Dubai, junior banker to regional head — mirrors her mountaineering one: methodical, deliberate, and ending significantly higher than it started.
Shradha Gupta's Everest summit is, at its core, a story about what happens when someone refuses to accept that ambition has a ceiling — professionally or geographically. It is also, for those of us who consider a brisk walk to the coffee machine a form of cardio, a gentle but firm reminder that "I don't have time" is perhaps not the airtight excuse we believed it to be.
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