My early days of playing with 'Kites'

I think I was in 3rd standard when our family shifted to Vijayawada. In those days every evening I used to watch kites flying over the sky. It was very much amazing (of course even now) to my eyes whenever a kite appears in the sky. During that time my parents used to beat me whenever I ask money for buying a kite (at that time a small one costs 25 paise). Especially my mother treats as a rogue whoever plays with kite. So couldn't get chance for a long time until my cousin visited our house during summer holidays. My cousin is a crazy fellow and I admire him a lot on creative side.

At that time he also doesn't know how to make a kite to fly. So we had wasted almost a dozen kites for the first one to fly. So we used to request, not request, used to beg our 'street kite masters' to make our kite to fly. We call it as "sutram" (formula) for connecting thread (a stranded thread will be connected to the kite in an equilateral triangle) on to the kite.

There was a myth in our minds. If our formula doesn't work we used to run along the street for lifting the kite into the air. So whoever does this we tease them as "parigethe galipatam" and we say it will never fly as its own as the kite learned flying only by running.

It took almost 3-4 years for learning kite dynamics. There is lots and lots of fun in this. We used to fly kites for competitions and for making different and interesting trajectories in the sky. I used to climb tall buildings and making noise over the terrace and finally beaten up by mother.

And now I used to make and balance any kind of kite on my own. Here is a photograph of mine during Sankranthi, playing with kite at RK beach, Visakhapatnam. It was wonderful and fun after a long time.