Just Saying | Do yetis really exist? It doesn’t matter if you grew up with the legendary creatures around you

Yonden Lhatoo explores the legend of the Abominable Snowman from a very personal point of view amid the recent debate over the purported discovery of mysterious footprints by the Indian army in the remote mountains of Nepal

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In this handout photo taken by the Indian Army, men measure large foot prints in the snow, sighted by the Indian Army, near the Makalu Base Camp in the North-Eastern Himalayas, which the army’s social media team said were photos of the mythical yeti. Photo: Handout

Published: 6:08pm, 11 May 2019Updated: 10:47pm, 11 May 2019

The Indian army recently created a global buzz – and invited a withering barrage of ridicule – by announcing it had found evidence of the fabled yeti’s existence during a mountaineering expedition in Nepal.

The army sent out a tweet to its nearly six million followers, claiming the expedition team had “sited [sic] mysterious footprints of mythical beast ‘Yeti’ measuring 35x15 inches” in the snow near the Makalu Base Camp on April 9.

You would not expect an office with the gravitas of the army’s Additional Directorate General of Public Information to mess around, which is why the tweet rekindled interest around the world in the actuality – or not – of the Abominable Snowman, that hirsute hominid of legend and Himalayan cousin of Bigfoot from American folklore.

If it turns out we’ve all been trolled on an industrial scale, I don’t mind in the least because it has certainly captured my imagination again and revived memories of the wide-eyed wonder I once felt as a boy growing up on stories of towering, apelike creatures hiding high up on the slopes of the mountains that dominated the skyline of my old hometown of Darjeeling.

During our schooling in the hills, my brothers and I were teasingly nicknamed “yetis one, two and three” by a maths teacher who was amused by the fact that we lived at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, which was in the middle of a sprawling jungle compound that also housed a zoological park – the insinuation being that we were as wild as the exotic animals in our backyard.