ROOM AND BOARD

Inside Gangtok's skateboarding subculture

- KUNGA TASHI LEPCHA

IN SEPTEMBER 2018, a member of the skateboarding community in Gangtok invited me to photograph an event. That was my first glimpse into this small fraternity and the skateboarding subculture in the city. In the following months, I started getting more involved with the community and in 2019, I decided to pursue this as a photography project.

In my photography work, I find it important to feel a personal connection with the subject-that is what attracts me to a project. As I witnessed the daily lives of the skateboarders in Gangtok, it echoed with the struggles of my youth. I found that I could relate to their experiences of growing up in this town. There is a marked dearth of facilities and open spaces for young people in Gangtok. There are limited avenues available for them to channel their energies in productive or creative ways. Public spaces where they can meet during their spare time are hard to come by. And many get immersed in drugs. That is how I grew up. I have sometimes partake in it myself, seen people overdose and lost friends to drugs. Sikkim has one of the highest suicide rates in the country, at 37.5 per 100,000 people, much higher than the Indian average of 10.6.