Every day at 7:30 in the morning, 49-year-old German Tibor Kiss makes his way to an abandoned hall in Mattancherry. He is joined there, by a group of young boys and together they skateboard. The cemented flooring, “formerly a badminton court,” in the outdoors of the house is suitable for the sport. For the next two hours, the group indulges in skateboard tricks like shove-it, ollie and kickflip to name a few.
Like them, there are groups of young boys and a few girls who have taken to this fairly new sport in the city. “We are now a 200 plus strong community,” says Tibor who is leading the pitch the city keepers to build a skateboard park.
An architect, Tibor has experience in designing trains, trams and Metro rail equipment. Skateboarding is his childhood passion. When he decided to relocate to Fort Kochi from Berlin, “after touring 70 plus countries in three decades of professional life,“ he resumed his hobby. “I was surprised to find a young boy skateboarding on the road in Fort Kochi,” says Tibor who connected with him to find that they are a group of six doing that. He soon realized that the city has a growing but fragmented skateboarding community and desperately needs a dedicated public space.
