Rang de Basant ki
Kite flying during Basant is one of the prettiest Punjabi traditions and one I look back on with fondness. This season, a journie from Lahore wants to ban kites because fighting string injures bystanders (via Andrew Sullivan). But that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater:
A beautiful cultural tradition has degenerated into a murderous sport… hundreds have been killed or wounded when their throats were cut by razor-sharp kite twine… motorcyclists [are] the most common victims of razor-sharp wire and usually lower-middle-class citizens who struggle to make ends meet…
Essentially, advocates of kite flying are ready to take the risk of more loss of life for two days of satisfaction… [Link]
Sometimes known as “manja”, the kite line used in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan is strengthened in one of three ways:
- cotton line coated with finely ground powdered glass;
- cotton line with a thin filament of wire twisted into the line;
- cotton line coated with chemical mixes…
The line also falls on the electrical grid and can create shorts and outages due to the embedded wire filament or when the chemical line gets wet and acts as a conductor. Over 25,000 tripped circuits of major sections of the city grid of Lahore were recorded during the Basant festival of 2005. [Link]
Fundies have argued kite flying is un-Islamic, which is a code word for ‘fun.’ These guys should’ve hooked up with the Puritans.
If the Supreme Court allows Basant celebrations to include kite flying this year, Musharraf and his cronies will have won a symbolic battle against Islamists… [Link]
India long ago banned firecrackers which contain more than a small amount of gunpowder. As long as cutting string is made in factories rather than at home, regulation ought to be able to solve the problem.
Last year’s Supreme Court order waiving the ban on flying kites came with stipulated conditions, including the regulation of manufacturers, sellers, and users. These went unheeded — nuanced law enforcement is not the Pakistan police’s forte — and surprise, surprise, people died. [Link]
You might as well ban flowers because a minority are poisonous, or chocolate because in large doses it kills. I don’t see an easy way to make cutting string safe for bystanders, but regular patang-giri can hardly be banned. The solution is right there in the piece: crack down on unsafe string factories, don’t ban kites.
on Friday, February 23rd, 2007, 9:28 pm in Holidays, Issues › 
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Manish,
Here’s another great resource for Basant festival pics.
Well, you should visit Gujarat on 14th January (Uttarayan). Any average size city to big city would do. There are so many kites in the sky that the whole sky is full of kites and all terraces are full of people playing lots of loud music. Lot of “patang” rivalries that I can remember, are integral parts of growing up there. That was the best festival of part of my childhood. I think it is impossible to imagine Gujarat without kites in January.
I have no problems with making it safer, but banning kites is a non-starter. Atleast in Gujarat, kite making is a significant seasonal business and banning it would be impossible for any politician to do. Mostly muslim artisans makes kites in Gujarat and they would be hit hard.
And yes the “manja” and knowing where to get the best “manja” were essential for a “successful” Utran, as it is referred locally. Although more a festival for the boys, I dont want to forget to mention that, girls would show up dressed up on terrace and ready to have fun and be seen.
Man, I miss those days.
I understand this a bit differently. It’s not that they want to just fly kites, it’s that they want to fly fighting kites, which involve having string sharp enough to cut with. It’s a competitive endeavor, you want to capture (or kill) the kites of others. Back in the day population density was less and the risks were less. But when I hear my father talk about kite flying back then, it was all about the fighting, not the flying.
To do what you say, you’d have to do more than regulation, you’d have to engage in social engineering with a big public campaign to change the meaning and associations of the event.
BTW, 9 dead this year.
Some ideas:
Kite string requires high tension. Agreed open areas, hard to stop people from flying off of roof tops. Will blog my answer soon ;)
Actually, my kite flying memories are from such a place where there is less population density, in the planned city of Gujarat called Gandhinagar (which is the capital of the state). Where we lived for few years, and as a teenager I engaged in the kite-FIGHTING ritual. Infact kite flying almost went on for a month, culminating on 14th January.
Even during the night of utaran there was a tradition to fly a kite and then send a candle enclosed by a small structure whose walls are made of kite-paper. It would look great as the candle went in the air with the kite. There would be some spoilers ready to cut this “candle-kite” although the “candle-kite” is not supposed to be cut as it is not actively involved in “kite-fighting”, but other kids tried it. Sometimes we flew other “protector kites”, which would protect our “candle-kite” from predators. Thats why I called it a growing up experience.