“Parkour is the art of overcoming obstacles. It very simply allows each person to explore their own strengths and weaknesses and work in alignment with that. Most people believe that parkour requires a certain level of agility and fitness but that is a myth! Parkour is a diverse sport that people across all fitness levels can train in it.

I believe my fascination with Parkour started way back in 2005. It was when these videos started surfacing on this popular social media platform ‘Orkut’. I was pulled into trying it and fell in love with a whole new sport. With time, we came to know about others in the city who were also practising parkour and there was a team by the name of ‘Urban Exodus’.

As someone who had worked in multiple domains, I can say with certainty that I chose parkour because this sport helped me a great deal in life. My passion and my deep calling were to give back to the community through this beautiful sport that has played an invaluable role in my life.

‘Parkour Circle’ was born as an offshoot of wanting to bring in more people to experience this sport. As our community grew bigger, we started to diversify our reach through theatre. We forayed into different sectors purely driven by curiosity and we discovered that working with children from the specially-abled community was a unique experience in itself. I would even go on to add that we learnt a lot more from teaching them than from them learning from us. We have also held programs to help spread awareness about mental health and strength training.

We are currently working on some projects and planning to release some science-backed research papers on the importance of parkour and its invaluable benefits.

As someone who trains people in public spaces, I see that there is a lot of curiosity to come and see what happens in a parkour space. People form opinions based on whatever videos they see on Instagram. But very few people come forward to try it. This is what I called a ‘Borrowed Experience’. People are so comfortable seeing rather than doing. But it is important to derive our own experiences from this world. One it helps us understand ourselves better and second, it makes life that more interesting and this world, a much more beautiful place to explore and discover.”

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