Parkour: The other side of Hazara town

The video ‘Hazara Parkour’ has received more than 3,500 shares on multiple social media platforms.

KARACHI:

Over the last three years, if you happened to pass by a certain empty plot located in Quetta’s Hazara Town, you were likely to spot a group of young boys being mercilessly put through their paces. As boys leaped over a series of obstacles, it was not uncommon for one of them to fall to the ground with a pulled muscle or worse, a bone unable to withstand the pressure, snapping to the sound of boos from a scattered audience. “My mother tells me, ‘We have enough problems as a community and the last thing I want now is to see you bedridden’,” says 17-year-old Ali Muhammad, a member of the Hazara community in the city.

But Ali has no intention to stop, testing the limits of his physical strength by practicing parkour, a holistic military training exercise in which participants must take the shortest possible route to a designated point by overcoming obstacles. He says he has worked hard to toughen his body to face any possible resistance; ‘resistance’ in this case can include anything from harassment at school to an attempted target killing.

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Earlier this year, an audience around the world watched Ali and his friends somersault, vault, jump and catapult their way past obstacles like tyres, brick walls or ditches. The video ‘Hazara Parkour’ was shot by Muhammad Ali Changezi (also known as ‘Mac’), a 20-year-old aspiring filmmaker from the Hazara community in Quetta, and received more than 3,500 shares on multiple social media platforms. The team is thrilled, and not too concerned that many watching the video mistook them to be Chinese athletes. “That’s probably because of our Mongolian features,” Ali says with a laugh. “But whatever the reason they are watching the video, I am glad that people got to see the other side of the Hazara community.”

“The best thing about this video is that it truly represents what Hazaras are capable of and how seriously they take the idea of physical toughness,” explains Mac. Ali and his teammates trained at the Hyderian Academy in Hazara Town, the old stomping ground of a number of Hazara martial artists, gymnasts and athletes. Ali says that as he witnesses members of his community being slowly, ruthlessly, picked off one by one, he is motivated to take his training in Wushu, Kung Fu and gymnastics seriously.

“Parkour is very intense and at the same time, very liberating – it does not have any rules,” Ali said. “This is why we like it so much.” When Ali and his teammates were told that they were not allowed to practice parkour within the Academy, the rules didn’t hold them back: they simply continued their training on a vacant rented plot.

In December 2013, the athletes collaborated with Mac on a video documenting their skills, shot in the neighbourhood of Marriabad, in the west of Quetta and at the base of Koh-e-Murdar (Mountain of the Dead), shooting the video in freezing conditions – it was -14 degrees Celsius at the time.

“Aesthetically, I felt Marriabad would be a great location as the landscape here defines the soul of Quetta, or what Quetta used to be,” Mac says. “It is beautiful, yet barren, huge and almost monstrous, but at the same time, it has a very soulful vibe to it.” There was also another reason. Mac felt Marriabad was the safest location to shoot the video, and he refused to take any risks in asking the team to travel between Hazara Town and Marriabad every day.

Thus they did not return to their homes in Hazara Town for three days. “Our physical features are such that we are prone to getting killed by a mere look at our faces,” explains Ali. “Every day when we get home, we breathe a sigh of relief that we returned alive.”

The video has generated interest in the team, bringing in 10 new members. Teenagers within the Hazara community say they would be interested to pursue parkour if a training academy offers lessons in the art. Ali and his team, however, are hoping to perform live for audiences and are also offering their talents as dancers and stuntmen for video directors. “What you see in the video is just a glimpse of what we can actually pull off,” says Ali.



Published in The Express Tribune, June 16^th, 2014.