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# Shivling Never Apologized
- URL: https://www.churnispeaks.com/notes/shivling/
- Published: 2026-03-26T17:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-03-26T17:00:00.000Z
- Description: A mountain I saw from a tent at 13,200 feet, and what it taught me about designing products.
- Author: Churni Bhattacharya
- Tags: Leadership, #note, #Import 2026-09-25 22:45

During my mountaineering training at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering almost 40 years ago, our base camp was at Gomukh - 13,200 feet, at the foot of the Himalayas. That's where I first saw Mount Shivling.

Known as the Matterhorn of the Himalayas, it has an unusually dramatic appearance - striking in a way that's a little hard to explain and yet impossible to ignore.

I used to sneak out of our tent at night and sit alone in the pitch dark, completely mesmerized by it. On the last night of camp, I looked up and whispered, "I will be back."

I left India a few years later.

With one knee replaced and another waiting its turn, I've made my peace with the fact that I probably won't. But Shivling has stayed with me in ways I still can't fully articulate.

It's not a well-known peak. At 21,467 feet, it's nowhere near the tallest. It's a highly technical climb that most people never attempt.

And yet there's something about it that commands a kind of awe that the famous mountains don't always produce - something in the combination of its form, its presence, its sheer indifference to whether anyone notices it at all.

My philosophy of product design lives in that same feeling.

Customer experience isn't a checklist of features or a set of metrics to hit. It's meant to be visceral - that specific combination of science and craft that makes someone feel something they can't quite put into words but absolutely know when it's missing.

You can't reverse-engineer it from a competitor's roadmap. You can't manufacture it by copying what the biggest, most well-known product in the market is doing.

You don't have to be the tallest mountain. You don't have to be the most famous one. You just have to know exactly what you are - and have the courage to stay that way, even when everyone else is asking you to be something different.

Shivling never apologized for what it was, and that always struck me as the right approach.

*First posted on LinkedIn, March 26, 2026.*