Kite Festival Jaipur
Photo Story
Joyous Fights - Kite Festival Jaipur [2018]
In the bazaar streets of Jaipur, and especially in the main street from the xxx gate to the xxx street, the many small shops that sell colorful paper kites and everything that goes with them to make them soar catch the eye. The sizes vary only slightly, from the very small, which seem to be intended more as decoration, since they are hardly suitable for air travel with their decimeter wing, to kites that measure perhaps 60 centimeters in the diagonal. The vast majority of the kites hung and stacked in front of the shops, however, are smaller, and definitely tiny compared to anything that was found to be worth letting into the autumn skies as kites in my own childhood and youth. Plastic skin over plastic rods, nylon cord on a reel, usually provided with clickable plastic handles … We always needed a helper, brother, sister or friend who was ready to unwind twenty meters of line with the kite in hand and to blow the kite in the wind that had to be strong for the thing to start up. If it didn’t work, the kite crashed with a rattle or didn’t even take off, it was the helper’s fault, of course, and I only really enjoyed it when my father had driven the kite up into the air (how could he do that?) and handed me the line roll. Until the next crash … Boring …
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Not so obviously for young and old in Jaipur, where the Kite Festival will be celebrated on January 14th, marking the transition of the sun into the tropic, which is why the kite sellers are making increasingly hectic sales in the weeks before. In front of the shops, boxes and bundles of paper kites are unloaded, sorted, stacked in the shops, the cord winding machines whir and wind the desired amount of meters on bamboo spindles; small children proudly run through the streets with one or two of the paper rectangles (30×30 centimeters of colored paper stretched over a thin bamboo frame and a bamboo stick diagonally crossing the rectangle), teenagers buy whole stacks of kites at once, fathers choose carefully … normal ‘dragons in red, blue, violet, gray, green, yellow, orange, some two- or even three-colored … there are bigger ones (then made of plastic foil) with movie stars on them, the Indian colors and the inscription 2016, Barbie, Hello Kitty, Mahendra Modi – what kind of statement would it be if the kite crashed, got tangled in a power line or in one of the trees in which more and more failed kites gather like strangely rectangular, oversized petals or seasonal tree decorations?
The kites are cheap, 3, – Rs for a simple one, 10-20 for a small, printed plastic, modes in large is more expensive, 30, – Rs, but it just hangs in front of the shops, apparently wants to send it to the wind none …
There are also different lines to choose from, the main difference being whether the line is simple and smooth or coated with a mixture of glue and glass dust … Important, because the actual festival will be about getting as many kites from the others as possible by skilfully maneuvering one’s own leash, accompanied by the roaring hoots of the winner and his friends that echo from the rooftops like in Germany at a football game … When I first heard it while walking through the city in the afternoon, nearby Coming from Chandpol, I accelerate my pace in anticipation of a demonstration or a mob that – so my media-soaked imagination – agitated by the Friday prayer, which has just ended, begins to push its way through the main street … Harmless joy! Friendly competition … groups of friends everywhere on the roofs of the old town, fathers of families with their sons, who move the colorful rectangles into the air with twitching movements until they are sometimes hundreds of meters high in the sky. Women and girls leaning against the parapets or in a window; they just watch – the game belongs to the male part of the population alone … And you, the small and large men play with full seriousness, highly concentrated, and it is a miracle that someone does not fall from one of the roofs for a long time, It is said that this also happens a few times every year – the holiday traffic also pushes accident-free around those men or even children who fly their kites on a street corner or in the middle of the street … A game ennobled by the joy that Maharajah Ram Singh II had in flying kites not only in his childhood, but also in his prime (he only lived from 1835-80). The first kite festival goes back to him, which is celebrated all over Rajasthan over three days, but nowhere like in Jaipur … although the number of kites in the sky is less, much less than I expected. A web entry pushes the decline to smartphone and Co. but maybe it is also due to something completely different, modern concepts of vacation and family that are increasingly finding their way into India, but certainly also because there are now many completely different and year-round possibilities of Entertainment and diversion gives …
Nevertheless – everywhere on the street corners of the main street in the old town not only the kite sellers generate sales, everywhere there are food stalls selling special sweets, along with hawkers who sell disposable plates and cheap jewelry or plastic toys – there are many women and families with small ones Children …
After sunset, then fireworks, and the whole families gather on the roofs, let red or yellow hot air balloons soar, until thousands of them move over the city into the night, drifting stars, accompanied by the thunder of firecrackers and rockets and excited sighs of the children and Women, when their balloon, not yet warm enough, begins to sink from the roof to the ground before it finally moves up with their cheers and clapping and the wind quickly moves further and further up and over the roofs of the surrounding houses is blown, accompanied by her and my good wishes …