It was a very small gathering at the retail outlet of a sports goods chain in Navi Mumbai. That didn’t stop Peter Van Geit from speaking passionately about what he had been doing the past several months.
A former employee of tech giant Cisco, Chennai-based Peter is well known in the Indian outdoors. A Belgian national, he was among the prime movers at the Chennai Trekking Club (CTC), contributed much to promoting an active lifestyle, helped clean up the city’s beaches, did excellent relief work during the Chennai floods and then got villainized when an unexpected forest fire killed several trekkers in Theni in Tamil Nadu. That last incident from March 2018 was a tense chapter.