Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Pakistan's famous kite festival cautiously returns after 19-year ban
Punjab is a geographical and ethnolinguistic region across modern-day
Pakistan and northwestern India. The Punjabi people traditionally celebrate the
start of spring with a kite-flying festival, called Basant, around the end of
January and the beginning of February. Lahore, the largest city in the region
and the second largest city in Pakistan, became a major center for Basant celebrations
with rooftops and open spaces filled with kite flyers, music, and seasonal
fairs. Kite flying is very competitive, and it involves battles to knock other
kites out of the sky by cutting their strings with sharp, metallic threads with
chemical materials, causing trouble to power cables and danger to
motorcyclists. Also, because there were so many excited kite-flying watchers who
fell from rooftops and shot guns into the air, the festival was banned in 2007.
After almost two decades of absence, the long-wanted spring festival returned earlier
this month. However, while people seemed to remember how to celebrate the
festival, young people had to learn how to fly kites and fight others because
they had never done it before. Now, kite-flying skills need to be redeveloped
to preserve the tradition.
Read the article and learn about Basant in the Panjub region.
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