The Great Ganesha

Picture courtesy: Andy Day

An article by Alec Wilkinson in last week’s double-issue of the New Yorker is about parkour - the art of running up walls, going down the rails (as opposed to the stairs) and jumping across rooftops. As it says in the magazine:

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. [link]

Parkour has a cousin - free running, seen in this ad for Nike.

The performer (and inventor of free running) is Sebastien Foucan. You may remember him from the opening scene of Casino Royale.

While the sport is fun to watch with its daredevilry, what caught my eye was its connections with India.

David Belle

The inventor of parkour, David Belle, went through a period of confusion in his life. His father was a fireman, and he became one too. But he found that the life did not suit him. So he joined the Marines. That didn’t work out, either. So where did he end up going? None other than apna des.

David was briefly a fireman recruit, until he hurt his wrist. While he was recuperating, he started thinking things over and saw that the life of a fireman had too many rules, and not enough action, and he decided to join the Marines, but he didn’t find the same values among them, the “traditional values.” He left the Marines and went to India, where he stayed for six months. [link]

Parkour took off after his return. When he got back, he began to get involved with his performances of parkour and creating videos, which eventually led up to a demonstration (which also included Foucan, incidentally, a childhood friend), that resulted in widespread publicity for the sport, and him getting several invitations to perform.

Belle’s inspiration for parkour was monkeys. And not just any monkeys - it was Indian monkeys. Including the one and only monkey god himself. That’s right, I’m talking about Hanuman.

Here’s what Belle did in India:

“I just kept training,” he said. “I was training in the trees.”

[...] “I was at a waterfall one day,” David went on, “and..in the trees were monkeys…I went…and played with the monkeys…learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.”

He then showed us, on a computer, a documentary called “Warriors of the Monkey God.” It was about a tribe of monkeys who live on the rooftops of Jodhpur. The people regard the monkeys as holy. We watched them leaping from rooftop to rooftop and through the trees.

[...] When it was finished, he said that after coming home he had just continued perfecting what he had learned from the monkeys. He had plans, he said, to make a movie with them. [link]

The Upshot
Interesting. So Belle was inspired by monkeys from the motherland. Notwithstanding his undoubted preconceptions of India being “exotic”, “spiritual”, and a place where one can “find oneself”, I have to admit, the stunts are damn cool.

In this one, Belle avoids rush hour to catch the evening line-up on the BBC.