Mak­ing the kite works out more like the art and craft les­son in POGO chan­nel with Rob. But with not the com­pli­cated n costly gad­gets that Rob uses — Cam­lin or Reynolds prod­ucts. We make a square paper, fix one stick in the diag­o­nal part and the other like a bow the other two diag­o­nals. The glue was some cooked rice. It needs some time to dry in the sun­light and get flat­tened. To make it flat, we cover it up with another set of paper and keep it under the piles of suit­cases [ every­one at home had their own suit­cases]. Then comes the Susthi­ram part.

Artha soost­hi­ram : We cal­cu­late it with the height from the top with four fin­gers and from the bot­tom, it is 8 fin­gers. We need to make a knot and hang/balance the kite [ Idhu ellaame uthe­samaa dhaan seivom ]. The kite is ready. The string con­tains few knots as the mat thread doesn’t come as con­tin­u­ous. the tail is made up of again some pieces of news paper.

One fine day, We made one of our best Kaathaadis and flew all the way close to the tele­phone tower. We never knew we could make that hap­pen. Out of curios­ity, we extended the thread till the final end was reached. It was held by me in the first hand and my cousin got the sec­ond for a safety [ DR site engi­neeru avaru ]. We missed the impor­tant knot to be made in the string­ball [ Knot son­nomla :) ]. Close.. In front of us, we lost our glo­ri­ous kite which was made near per­fect. It flew away very fast and crossed the tem­ple nearby. We couldn’t climb the tem­ple wall and chase. [ Inneram school groundai dhaandi irukum.. vudraa]. That was the best of kathaadi days. But we weren’t sad because the life of our hand made kathaadi is very less [ just a day ]. We never wor­ried and just got into the next sport flu­idly [ Srinivasa-la ennada padam ? ].

One sub-plot is about our ‘goli’ games. The types are : reg­u­lar, soda, dama [ big ones ]. Dama golis were used for the game ‘Lock’ played by seniors, mostly [ un pakka­maa.. en pakka­maa ]. We played the sim­ple raja game to oorkaa bEnd­haa [ Baya­padad­hinga ]. The UB game is slightly a lengthy one and the guy who is lost will be asked to run the goli with his folded fist [ idhuku thamizh per son­naa enaku adi vizhum.. venaam]. I was good in play­ing golis — I used to earn [?! ] many mar­bles from ‘goli mela’ games. [ bet katradhu — film melayum aadalaam — match box label melayum vel­ladalaam ha..ha..]. My father used to throw the golis back to street [ kash­tap­patu sam­barichadhu ! ]. One more trivia is that Pondicherry still has the tra­di­tion of play­ing Boules [ or bowls ] — a game with iron balls learnt from French peo­ple. Do u know ‘Pen­tanque’ — the French game ?

Try observ­ing the lyrics of Laj­javad­hiye and Vey­ilodu velayadi songs. Na.Muthukumar has extracted the best of child­hood n vil­lage games.

After com­ing back to Chen­nai, I started vis­it­ing beach [ Ungaluku vere edame kedaikaadhe ! ]. The best part of Marina beach now is they sell kites for just Rs.10/- . Leave about the price. The hap­pi­ness, I felt was price­less. My fam­ily still won­ders why I buy a sep­a­rate kite for me and fly the same, smilingly.

:)
–Toto.