Our “Kai Po Che” thing was little different this year. We didn’t fly any kites this year. However, after sumptuous khandaan special brunch from my Radhika’s kitchen, Revanth and I drove to People Plaza on Necklace Road of Hyderabad, where hyderabadis folks (of all ages, gender, religion, social strata, etc.) converge to fly kites on Pongal. Revanth and I stopped by this place to witness the fun and capture several hundred snaps.

As kids, we used to get into flying kites mood at least two months in advance. We often made manjha on our own. Though process was quite amateurish, results were quite impressive. We used to steal cooked rice from the kitchen, squeeze gooey from cactus plants behind our house, take broken glass pieces and ground them up, take / steal haldi from the kitchen, and make a paste out of all the ingredients. Then get the twine string pass through the manjha paste for our special secret manjha. Mom used to get all of us brothers a tetanus shot month in advance to get us immune (specially brothers number 1 and number 4, who were known running around the streets, jump the walls and buildings, sometimes without slippers trying to catch broken kites). Now the Kite Festival is celebrated just 2 days max.

Many folks posed and smiled for us, and encouraged us to take snaps.  Few (looking at length of the lens), even asked us, when and which newspaper will showcase the snaps.  We just smiled and said, “It could be any newspaper”.   Most snaps were taken on the zoom lens with our subjects not realizing that we were around; to capture the essence of Hyderabadis enjoyed kites festival, in its native form.

I absolutely did not had any time to correct the photos for white balance, exposure and crop them to bring out the best in these snaps.  I just threw the snaps that I thought conveys the essence of what we saw on Necklace road, into iMovie and compiled the attached video in a record time. If I don’t do it know, I know that I will probably will never.

Below link gets you to the video, and blog will highlight few of our favorite snaps