History

When NOS first discovered parkour in late 2006, he realized it was something he had been doing all his life anyway, but that now it just had a name, and was a formal discipline. He immediately immersed himself in conducting some extensive research about the discipline itself on the internet, from the then-available resources, to further his understanding about it before jumping right in to start training something he had no idea about.

At that time, parkour was still new in many parts of the world, and was just about gaining a foothold, so online learning avenues and resources were few. The original founders of the discipline, the first generation practitioners from France, had not yet started taking responsibility of the thing they had inadvertently created, and the second generation of practitioners who started in Britain (and from there onwards in other parts of the world) in 2003, were just discovering things for themselves. So whatever online learning material was available at that time was still new and untested, and largely the result of a lot of trial and error in the dark, and thereby, in many cases, unreliable.

However, this trial and error method was the only way of learning parkour at all for many around the world, and they had no other option, but to try and discover things on their own. The same was the case with the first few people around India who had just discovered Parkour, and were beginning to start out on their own. It is just now, since 2010, that parkour knowledge has really exploded after the first generation practitioners started putting in more input, and the second generation practitioners had begun to refine their knowledge over the years, thereby both groups pooling their resources into developing the advanced and in-depth knowledge we have about the discipline today.

It is in this environment, that after futilely training by himself for a while, NOS started looking for practitioners in and around Mumbai to train with. After contacting the only parkour group in the country at that time with a web-presence, the Team Mutants of Delhi, who had started out a few months earlier, he managed to obtain contact details of some guys from Mumbai, who had also been actively expressing interest about learning parkour on the then sole means of online communication - Orkut. Getting hold of people proved difficult than it seemed, because NOS did not have an Orkut account, and even after creating one, catching hold of his contacts was still troublesome. Finally he managed to nail down a guy called Ronak Vasa, and they got together for a few training sessions. It was then he realized that there were another couple of guys called Akshat Bhargava and Suraj Mandal from Nerul, who had started training on their own in the hotspot-rich area of New Bombay around the same time as NOS had started out on his own in his local area of Juhu, and whom Ronak himself had joined at their sessions at Kharghar station a few times. As it turns out, these guys most probably first started a semblance of 'regular practice sessions' in Mumbai in the month of Nov 2006, which continued for the next few years. Also, since around this same time-frame, they were joined in their practice sessions not just by local practitioners, but also people from other areas of the city (Ronak from the Western Suburbs, and a few guys from the outlying areas beyond New Bombay), this was also the beginning of the first 'parkour jams' in Mumbai.

After a few months, around the spring of 2007, NOS met up with Akshat and Suraj for training himself, along with Ronak. This was a historic moment for Parkour in Mumbai, because it was here that they first put forth a proposal that had till then just been a growing nagging feeling in NOS' head - that of creating a proper website for parkour in the city/country. All the guys present agreed with NOS' idea, and NOS and Ronak set about the mammoth task of putting together the website. Till this time, there was no proper website for any parkour presence in the entire country, and NOS felt that if there were more people out there like him, who wanted to train parkour with other like-minded individuals, but had nowhere to go to, nor knew where to search for such people in their local area (where existing international websites wouldn't have helped them), needed a common platform where they could search for and connect with traceurs, and organize training sessions. Thus was born 'Parkour Mumbai', now an official entity after having been an informal collection of rag-tag practitioners around the city, and a lousy Orkut Community for the better part of the past year. NOS and Ronak created the website under the url http://www.parkourmumbai.co.in/ because, as it turns out, just a month before they tried to put their long-discussed plans in action, another person by the name of Ashish Kadam (zegulas) had already registered the domain http://www.parkourmumbai.com/. Later Ashish became a great friend of NOS, and supporter of Parkour Mumbai, but at that point in time, it seemed like two websites would have to strive in rivalry for the same purpose - capturing the parkour audience in Mumbai.

It was also at this same time, before the official launch of the Parkour Mumbai website, that Ronak accidentally created the greatest thing ever - the world-famous Parkour Mumbai Logo. NOS first had the brainwave of trying to form a 'P' shape with the silhouette of a traceur doing a cat-leap on a wall, and then they both futilely spent the next two months trying to create the perfect image for the P, along with going ahead with NOS' insane idea of trying to form a similar 'M' shape with a silhouette of a traceur doing some parkour-related movement, but thankfully, Ronak's better sense of design prevailed, and after many crude drawings exchanged on both ends, one fine day he finally emailed NOS the picture that would come to be recognized as a unique insignia worldwide. Ronak himself wasn't very happy with his rough-sketch, but NOS immediately saw the piece of brilliance for what it was, and incorporated the full image into the website's header without making any changes.
Oh, and it's worth mentioning that the official Parkour Mumbai gmail id was initially handled by both NOS and Ronak, but later Ronak stopped using it after he forgot the password, and eventually moved away from his admin responsibilities, and NOS changed the password, and over time the email account became an extension of his personal email id more than the official Parkour Mumbai email id.

Parkour in Mumbai really began to pick up after the launch of the website, just as NOS had foreseen. Although the other website (Ashish's) remained largely static, the main website (ours) saw regularly updated content, and after a brief ironic dry spell during the monsoons, we began to see a steady inflow of practitioners from September 2007. This was the period when we first met the people that would change the face of Parkour Mumbai, and define what we would come to stand for for years - The Architect, Weirdo, and later, The Aviator. This was also the same time when a few other guys joined us in our regular training sessions, who would in a few months come to be known as Team NUTs.

During this time, after the rendezvous in spring 2007, the training in Mumbai split up again between two geographic areas - New Bombay, and the Western Suburbs, and the two sides did not meet each other again till Nov 2007, when they decided to meet up on the third Sunday of November that year for a major rendezvous and jam, introducing the newly swelled ranks of both sides to each other. (This later gave rise to the tradition of holding an annual Parkour Mumbai Pk-Day Jam every third Sunday of November each year, extrapolating the probable date from the first year, 2006, and using the certain date from the 2007 jam, a tradition that continues till today.) We also met Ashish at this same 2007 jam for the first time, and this was the beginning of the eventual merging of the two seemingly rival websites, as a great friendship began between Ashish and the PkMum members after they all realized they were on the same side after all.

Over the next few months, by Feb 2008, we began to see a pattern that would establish itself as the norm for ages to come - new members joining, and older members leaving after a short while after getting bored of training. A few dedicated members managed to hold on, and stayed as the only constant faces in each training session. They eventually decided to form the Team NUTs, comprising of the most dedicated and regular practitioners from the Western Suburbs, and from New Bombay. However, this effort was short lived, and the team disbanded by Jul 2008, when we removed three members from the group for misbehavior (and who have been misbehaving even more as a revenge ever since). During the summer of 2008, we saw two more defining moments in the history of Parkour Mumbai - Akshat's collar-bone injury from a roll gone bad on wet grass (which would eventually be the catalyst that would lead to the death of Parkour in New Bombay), which was the first recorded major parkour-related injury in Parkour Mumbai; and the starting of 'parkour classes' by Suraj in New Bombay. The class was short lived, and the combination of lack of proper knowledge and experience on Suraj's part for a teaching job, along with the threat of the oncoming monsoon season of 2008 spelling doom for all outdoor practice, and Akshat's injury creating a psychological negative effect on the minds of the New Bombay traceurs and their parents, all spelled the doom for this class within two months of its launch.
In the summer of 2008, we also became host to the first female parkour practitioners (traceuses) in India. The two girls who joined us became the country's first and second official traceuses, and continued training regularly with us for a few months. Even later, after we had started the classes, Parkour Mumbai was the only place that still attracted and retained female participation in Parkour for a long time to come, and churned out some really famous traceuse names in the country.

By Jun 2008, owing to several circumstances, Parkour Mumbai was forced once again to consider starting a proper, structured, formal parkour class, this time in the Western Suburbs. The regular practitioners and Team NUTs members shortlisted two candidates as the most eligible people to run said classes - NOS, and The Architect, both of whom had a lot of in-depth knowledge and experience about the discipline of parkour having not just practiced over the past two years, but also through the extensive studies they had conducted into the discipline; along with their extensive backgrounds in Martial Arts going back several years, including prior teaching experience; their backgrounds as Fitness Trainers/Strength Coaches; and not the least of all the fact that they were the oldest and most mature members of Parkour Mumbai. Neither of the two were very enthusiastic about the idea of teaching parkour formally at first, but finally, The Architect backed out completely, and NOS was cornered into accepting the group's wishes and the circumstances, and started the country's first, legitimate, formal parkour class on Jul 23, 2008.

For the purpose of running the class safely in an indoor environment with proper infrastructure, Parkour Mumbai obtained permission for using the Judo Hall of the Sports Authority of India Sports Training Center, Kandivali, Mumbai, from its Assistant Director, Mr. Virendra Bhandarkar, whose graces ensured and cemented the long-term survival and growth of parkour not just in Mumbai, but also all over the country. This was immensely important for legitimizing parkour in the country, which so far had just been a fringe street-based extreme sport in the eyes of most people who came in contact with the discipline. Over the next few years, the classes and the gym flourished, as we obtained permission from the government to add more fixed and movable equipment to the gym, thereby becoming the only full-fledged parkour facility in the entire country, along with the title of being the only legitimate parkour class in India.

Parkour Mumbai unofficially shifted its headquarters to this gym from its previous training haunt at Santacruz after starting the classes, and continues to operate out of this place. A few months after starting the class, the last remaining first generation of practitioners from Parkour Mumbai also lost their interest in training, and slowly dropped out one by one, and NOS was the only one still left. Ashish was among the members that also stopped training, and had lost interest in running and maintaining a website, also thinking that there was no point having two websites for the same purpose. He offered NOS the parkourmumbai.com domain, and the two PkMum websites merged into a single website by August 2008, with the dot com domain remaining as the flagship domain, and the dot co dot in domain allowed to expire gradually. NOS continues handling his charge to this day, even though he himself has slowed down on the training front as well.

Over the next few years, we saw many ups and downs, but despite that, the progress graph for Parkour Mumbai slowly but steadily rose upward, and continues to do so. We have weathered all storms, and remain the only ones standing from among ALL the people who first started out on the journey of parkour in the country along with us, still retaining the title of being the oldest and still surviving parkour community in the country. We will continue to fight all obstacles that are thrown our way in true parkour-style - by overcoming them with precision and fluidity.

Recovered from a Wayback Machine capture dated 23 January 2014. See the archived original.

Who We Are

Parkour Mumbai is the main organization and community of Parkour practitioners in Mumbai. We are also the oldest surviving Parkour community in the country, and are the pioneers of the Parkour movement in India. Our founding members are some of the oldest traceurs in the country, and helped form both the entire Parkour scene in Mumbai, and later the Parkour India Initiative.

Parkour Mumbai originally started out as a community of dedicated practitioners in and around the Mumbai region, and the website was meant to be the online representation of practitioners, and a platform for them to get in touch with each other and organize training sessions. Today we are the major source of proper Parkour learning in the country. We at Parkour Mumbai provide training infrastructure and gyms, and also facilitate this online learning platform. Mumbai today has many different groups of practitioners scattered across the city, and most of them can still trace their roots back to Parkour Mumbai.

We have stood strong through the years, progressed by leaps and bounds, and done more for legitimizing Parkour in the country than any other Parkour-based individual, group, or organization has so far. This has all been made possible primarily through the vision, iron-will, and determination of its head, NOS, who is unarguably the country's most prolific traceur.

What We Stand For

To get a better understanding of our approach to Parkour, to its training and the community, to business, and the principles and philosophies we believe in, please go through this document.

Mission Statement

Our primary mission is to promote the growth and development of physical excellence in Mumbai and India.
Next, our mission is to set up and run well-equipped gymnasium facilities and provide infrastructure to promote the growth and development of Parkour and Freerunning in India.

Some Statistics

Parkour Mumbai has always been at the forefront of spearheading the Parkour movement not just in Mumbai, but also across the country. We have many 'firsts' to our name, and have always been involved in holding regular public jams to spread awareness and promote training. We believe in teaching Parkour in a systematic manner to newcomers, and in bringing proper Parkour knowledge to communities outside of Mumbai as well.

Parkour Mumbai -
> first people to start Parkour in the country.
> first Parkour website in the country.
> first place to start holding regular public jams in the region (local jams) and across India (national jams).
> first community to train with, host, and reach out to other communities across the country, as well as internationally.
> first community to start a nation-wide community initiative.
> first community in the country to have practicing female members, and also the only one that still continuously features regular female participation.
> first place to start a formal Parkour class in India.
> first Parkour gym in India.

Recovered from a Wayback Machine capture dated 15 January 2014. See the archived original.