Rewriting the Polar Ledger

Kaamya Karthikeyan’s skiing odyssey to the South Pole crowns a teenage career built on astonishing willpower and endurance.

At 18, Kaamya Karthikeyan has become the youngest Indian and the second-youngest woman anywhere to ski to the South Pole. It is a feat that sounds deceptively neat in a newspaper headline which somehow fails to capture the gruelling reality of this stupendous achievement involving weeks of hauling a sled across the Antarctic nothingness, in temperatures that punish skin and spirit alike. In an age addicted to spectacle, Karthikeyan’s achievement is so striking precisely because it is so austere.

Anyone who has read even a little about Antarctica, whether in the grim stoicism of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s ‘The Worst Journey in the World’ (1922) or the measured heroics of Roland Huntford’s dual biography of Scott and Amundsen (1979), knows that distances there are misleading. It is the conditions that punish.

Along Karthikeyan’s 115-kilometre route to the South Pole, temperatures sank to minus 30 degrees Celsius as winds scoured the surface, lifting hard ice crystals into blinding whiteouts. Beneath her skis lay sastrugi, or wind-carved ridges of frozen snow that sap momentum and patience in equal measure. She pulled her own sled throughout, carrying food, fuel and survival gear and completing the journey entirely on foot. This was the hardest way to complete a Polar Odyssey.

By becoming the youngest Indian to ski to the South Pole, Karthikeyan has inserted herself into a global narrative of exploration that still skews heavily Western. Polar history is crowded with Norwegians, Britons and Americans – from Amundsen and Shackleton to Ranulph Fiennes. In this narrative, Indians are scarce, and young Indian women as good as absent.

Now, Karthikeyan’s achievement complicates lazy assumptions about who gets to explore the extremes of the planet.

Polar travel is regulated, expensive and unforgiving of mistakes. Training regimes are clinical and include pulling weighted tyres to simulate sleds, learning to manage frostbite, mastering the tedious rituals of campcraft in sub-zero conditions. The Antarctic is not a place for dramatic heroics. Success depends on a mind-numbing routine which drains the reserves of one’s mental strength. It is only ski, eat, rest, repeat. The mind must learn to accept monotony as a condition of survival. For an 18-year-old to submit to this iron discipline says something essential about Karthikeyan’s character. Youth is usually associated with impatience, and Polar travel punishes it.

Raised in a naval household in Mumbai, Karthikeyan is the daughter of Commander S. Karthikeyan of the Indian Navy and educator Lavanya Karthikeyan. As an alumna of Navy Children School, she encountered the outdoors early, gravitating towards endurance sports that demand discipline rather than flash.

Mountaineering, long-distance trekking and polar travel form a niche within a niche, even globally. In India, where sporting aspiration is often funnelled towards cricket or increasingly, some Olympic disciplines, the idea of skiing across polar ice is almost eccentric.

And yet, before turning 18, Karthikeyan had already assembled a climbing résumé that would be impressive at any age. In 2024, she completed the Seven Summits Challenge, scaling the highest peaks on all seven continents - Everest, Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Vinson and Kosciuszko. She became the youngest Indian and the second-youngest woman globally to summit Mount Everest from the Nepal side. At 13, she had climbed Aconcagua in 2020 as the youngest girl to do so, and Mount Elbrus in 2018, combining the ascent with a ski descent - an uncommon feat even among seasoned climbers.

Karthikeyan’s has moved steadily from high-altitude mountaineering into polar travel, marking a shift from vertical suffering to horizontal endurance. The South Pole expedition places her on the final leg of the Explorer’s Grand Slam, a coveted milestone combining the Seven Summits with ski journeys to both poles. Now, with Antarctica behind her, only the North Pole remains.

The Grand Slam demands mastery across radically different environments. While few muster the courage to complete it, fewer still manage to do it so young.

Karthikeyan’s inspirations are telling. Rather than the heroes of a bygone era, she cites figures such as Felicity Aston, the British polar explorer known for solo, unsupported crossings. It is a lineage defined by self-sufficiency rather than spectacle. Today, a small ecosystem of endurance athletes is emerging, supported by global training networks and a growing appetite for unconventional achievement. Karthikeyan stands at the frontier of this shift, expanding the idea of what Indian sporting ambition can look like.

While Polar exploration remains male-heavy, culturally and numerically, Karthikeyan’s presence challenges that imbalance. Having reached the end of the Earth, Kaamya Karthikeyan is already looking beyond it.