Kite Flying Isn't As Easy As It Seems

One of my 20009 new year resolutions was to fly a kite. The last time I had flown a kite was maybe 20 years ago. It didn't fare to well at it then. I ran with the kite, it flew and gained altitude quickly but fell to the ground just as quickly when I stopped running. Not enough wind perhaps.

This time around, I was at a beach. With my more mature understanding of the science of upwind and downwind, this time I was sure to succeed at getting the kite up. I was with my friends and their family in the island of Pangkor off the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. It was a holiday get together but I took the opportunity to have fun with teaching yoga to my enthusiastic young students, children of my friends. I wasn't planning on the fulfilling my kite flying commitment but Kala had bought a kite for her kids to try it out.

So I volunteered to show-off my non-existent kite flying skills to the kids, being the know-all swami that I am. So we put the kite together, figured the wind direction blowing from the calm sea and we let the kite loose. It gained may be about 15 feet off the ground, looking really good, but less than a minute of flight time the kite nose dived into the beach sand. We tried everything, running with it, waiting for that perfect gust of wind that would carry the colourful kite into the proverbial heavens. Unfortunately it was all to no avail. It kept falling on the beach and even a few times in the sea. It was like trying to start a car with no fuel in it! After about half an hour we called it quits, ready to relegate the kite into cold storage until the next rare offing that we might come together on a beach for some fun and perhaps more kite flying experiment. I surmised our basic failure in getting the kite up to...well...not enough wind, yet again. Just our luck, the wind was not strong enough, even by the beach of all places! However a wise lawyer friend countered more rightly, "No, we just don't know the right technique". I humbly concurred with his conclusion.

Indeed reflecting on life, everything requires some level of skill to master, even the seemingly simple art of kite flying. Perhaps I should go to the master kite flyers of Kelantan (a Malaysian state) who fly the huge Wau kites, among the highest flying kites in the world with no less than thick ropes instead of mere threads. There's always something new to learn.

Now for some MyHinduPage matters. If you scan the homepage this month, May 09, you will notice that MyHinduPage was very quiet content-wise last month. It was Hindu New Year, and there is only one content entry for the month which is a New Year greeting. This was mainly due to a community service project that my friends and I have been working on. It is called the Sadhana Visionary Academy. It is an education institution for the disadvantaged and financially challenged students that we are working to launch in January 2010. You can read all about the Sadhana Visionary Academy - Click Here. This launching we are preparing for massively, it's not going to be anything like kite flying!