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Forty-five BASE jumps, 335 skydives, scores of mountaineering expeditions and countless scuba dives - 40-year-old Archana Sardana has pretty much done it all! It comes as a surprise that till the age of 24 she hadn't played a single outdoor sport. Today, Sardana is resting on a pretty bunch of laurels. She happens to be the only female civilian BASE jumper in India and the first Indian woman to qualify as the Master Scuba Diving Trainer (MSDT).
For the uninitiated, a BASE jump is a fall from a fixed object. The word comes from Building, Antenna, Span and Earth. Sardana first completed a jump from a 400-feet high bridge in Utah and then unfurled the national flag from two high towers in Malaysia. Though a BASE jump takes place from a lower height than a skydive, the equipment and technique for the two are different. "You have only one parachute in a BASE jump as compared to two in a skydive. So if you have a glitch in the parachute while performing the jump, you are done for," says Sardana who has even performed a free fall from a height of 13,500 feet. It is for this reason that a BASE jumper needs to be stout of heart and quick of wits. "You need to be able to decide where to land. Once I was jumping from a big canopy in Kuala Lumpur, when a big gust of wind suddenly swayed my parachute and it ended up getting stuck in a tree. I even got hurt that one time," she says. A skydive, though performed from a higher altitude, has more safety nets in place with protective guards along with an altimeter to constantly assess your height.
Her tryst with adventure first started in 1998 when she enrolled for the basic mountaineering course at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling. "The first adventure course was just for fun, but the next level was gruelling and tough," says Sardana, who was one of the speakers at the recently-concluded Second Adventure Speaker Series by Taj Safaris, Ibex Expeditions and the Outdoor Journal.
Today, Sardana runs a scuba diving institute in Mundka, a bustling locality in West Delhi. "I want to give exposure to people, especially the school-going children," says Sardana, who follows the course prescribed by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI). The course at her institute is divided into three sections - online theory module, confined water training and open sea experience. "The theory and confined water aspects of training are conducted at the institute's swimming pool itself to establish comfort level with the equipment and the skills," says Sardana, who has high-end Scubapro equipment, including masks, fins, buoyancy control device, regulator, cylinder, exposure suits, submersible pressure gauge, compass, so on and so forth. For the open sea training, Sardana takes groups of students to dive sites in the Andamans, Thailand et cetera. Last year she conducted a training session with students from Bishop Cotton School, Shimla. "If you give these young adventurers the right training, they can become great scuba divers," says Sardana whose sons, ages 11 and 13, are trained divers too.
