A puzzling story out of Pakistan, apparently they hate kites there so badly they arrested over 1000 people for kite flying at a recent kite-flying festival (go figure the crafty detective work there). Apparently this just isn’t “the man” stomping on some light-hearted fun, these are some hard-core nasty kite flyers. The police report that some 500 people are injured yearly during this kite festival:
“…from sharp kite strings and others from stray bullets or pellets fired into the air to celebrate the festival.”
Yes, apparently these guys use metal and glass coated strings to have kite dogfights and cut each other’s strings, pretty and nasty. Apparently 7 people died last year from string lacerations. Wow, these kite guys mean business. I can’t help but think that they would be left alone if they sort of refrained from the kite skeet shoot part of the celebration.
Read this just developing story for yourself.
Yikes. Dead of lacerations, eh? I read a novel last year called The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan, and indeed they take this sport very seriously, and boys do get their hands cut pretty badly. Next best thing to having the last kite in the sky is to be the kid who chases down the second-last kite and catches it as it hits ground. I wonder if they look at the stats about kite flying the way we look at hockey injuries?
Well, there you go, third-party corroboration, it’s almost like journalism, if you didn’t mentioned a novel.
thanks Ali.