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Mumbai's 90-year-old 'patang baaz' recounts laurels he earned while flying kites
Updated On: 14 January, 2024 07:00 AM IST | Mumbai | Arpika Bhosale
Ahead of Makar Sankranti, 90-year-old famed patang baaz Dilip Kapadia jogs his memory to recount the laurels earned while flying kites from Mumbai to Normandy
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You have to be sharp, quick on your feet, brutal in attack. There is no time for self-doubt. You have 15 minutes to touch the heavens. Pics/Satej Shinde
As a teenager in the 1920s, Dilip Kapadia spent long hours indulging in his first love of flying kites. This was at Girgaum’s Chowpatty beach before the 2014 ban on patang baazi and manja wars kicked in. His first brush with the hobby was when he was just four. “I lived at Sikka Nagar near Prarthana Samaj; we moved here when I was six,” Kapadia says, seated in his apartment in a three-story heritage building at Babulnath with a wooden exterior painted brown and yellow.
During one of his flying sessions at Chowpatty, a bystander named Peer Mohammad Ali Mohammad, suggested that he participate in an upcoming competition in Jaipur. “I was 17. Peerubhai eventually became my guru; he taught me how to choose the right kite, understand the shape of the wooden bow that runs horizontally across it, how much pressure to apply while bending the kite from either side to feel its strength, and finally how manja should feel between your fingers.”
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