Gurdial Singh was an Indian schoolteacher and mountaineer who led the first mountaineering expedition of independent India to Trisul in 1951. In 1958, he led the team that made the first ascent of Mrigthuni .
In 1965, he was a member of the first successful Indian expedition team to climb Mount Everest.
An acrostic, penned by renowned novelist and writer Vikram Seth (after Singh's death), dedicated to Gurdial Singh, who was Seth's housemaster at The Doon School in the late 1960s.