“Three months broke me, and I still think about India every single day. I hate it and I love it. Both.”
The country that stays with you
Mike Boisvert spent three months crossing India, and when he finally flew out he cried in the Kuala Lumpur airport, from joy, because nobody was honking. Two years later: “I still think about India every day.” The first thing to understand is scale. India is almost a continent: north to south is seven days on a train. Like Canada, the scene is everywhere and nowhere at once: small subcultures in every city, and even a village of 200 people might have a skatepark. And all of it is young: fifteen, maybe twenty years old at most.
Seventy skateparks, most behind a gate
Mike's estimate: around 70 parks in the country, most of them private. Entry might be two dollars: cheap once, heavy every single day. Since skateboarding entered the Olympics that has started to change: public parks are coming, including the biggest public skatepark in India, freshly built. The quiet advantage is 100 Ramp, a skater-owned park-building company out of Bangalore that pours proper concrete across India and Nepal. “That's what you need: a construction company from the country who knows what they're doing. Most countries don't have that. India does.”
Where to skate
Chandigarh is the best park Mike skated in India: brand new, California-standard, free, with a real daily culture of twenty locals. It technically wasn't open yet when he visited; he talked his way past the guards. “It's India for you.” Carter Road, on Mumbai's seafront, is one of the country's only free public parks; rough around the edges, but it's theirs. And Desert Dolphin, in Khempur, is the park Netflix built for the movie Skater Girl and left to a Rajasthan village of 200 people. Mike walked twelve kilometres through the desert to reach it, slept in the village and ate on the floor by hand, a goat in the corner of the house. “That was my best experience of India.”
Three skaters to know
Kushal Gaikwad (@kushalgaikwad__) is Mike's pick: “best street skater in India,” a YouTuber who once skated 50 Mumbai spots in a single day. Urmila P (@ursk8kid) blew up online and now skates and models for a living between Mumbai, Barcelona and Dubai: big pop, pure street. Kima Ralte (@kima_gr) is a freestyler from the Northeast who placed near the top of the world freestyle rankings and teaches skateboarding's history in wildly creative videos. “He's an educator. Really important for the scene.”
Varanasi
The story Mike keeps telling: the most spiritual city on Earth, where around 200 bodies are cremated on the ghats every day, and where exactly two skaters live. He skated with both of them, metres from the fires, monkeys and goats in the run-up. Eight days, the hardest travel of his life, and the best video he has ever made.
The math
India has 1.4 billion people, and roughly 27% are between 15 and 29: about 370 million young people. Cricket gets the investment, parents stay skeptical, most parks charge at the door. And yet one minute into any street demo, Mike has the biggest crowd of his travels. If even a fraction of those kids steps on a board, everything changes.
If you go
Land in Mumbai. Two weeks buys you six cities: Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Goa, Ahmedabad. The north is hectic, the south is calmer, and English works nearly everywhere. But be honest with yourself: India takes months.
Mike Boisvert: “I'll probably go back all my life. Crazy country.”
Watch the full India series
Photos and video: Mike Boisvert / The Skate Nomad. Part of the JACKALOPE Skate Atlas, one country at a time, with the skaters who live there. See every country on the map.
