Mysuru: Setting the stage for the 10- day annual Dasara extravaganza, that is still over a week away, dozens of kites took to the skies over Mysuru Saturday evening as part of a two- day kite festival that began at the Lalit Mahal helipad here.
Thirty professional kite flyers from Mangaluru, Surat, Rajkot, Hyderabad and Mumbai are showing off their skills at the festival hosted by the Mysuru district administration and the tourism department.
While Ministers G.T. Devegowda, U.T. Khader, MLAs Taveer Sait, Ashwin Kumar, Harshavardhan and L. Nagendra and Mysuru DC Abhiram Shankar launched the festival by flying a kite, over a 100 varieties of kites dotted the sky to loud music by the Stone Age band as the event took off. Children enjoyed some fun games and people made a beeline for food trucks serving traditional girmit, chokri chat, paav baaji, momos and ice creams. The largest kite at the show was 36 feet tall and 10 feet wide and belonged to Mr Sarvesh Rao (56) and his team . The owner of an electrical motor winding workshop in Mangaluru , his team is made up of three chartered accountants, engineers, and a professional art master. With a reputation for flying kites depicting Indian classical dances like Kathakali, Yakshagana, Bharathanatyam and Bhootha Kola , the team has flown them at events across India and the world, including Canada, France, UK, Thailand, Hongong, Qatar and Dubai.
“The Internet has been a blessing for us to reach out to the youth and introduce the old tradition of kite flying to them. Dasara too provides us with a similar platform,” said Mr Rao Other teams at the event are flying kites of a variety of shapes and sizes, including some resembling Garuda vahana.
