In our pervious tryst with the Khirki community, we mapped the street, made friends with a few residents and held a show where we photographed friends and understood their perspective on friendship and what it means to them. We also held a collage workshop for the children of the street and the response was encouraging. On the basis of this we held our second workshop of “Kite making†for the children. We invited skilled kite makers from Old Delhi and invited 20 children from the street to learn kite making. On the 22nd of January 2005 the children poured in and by the time we were winding up the number of participating children had escalated up to 26. The enthusiasm of the children was a lot more than it had been in any of the previous workshops we had ever held. Each child made 5-6 kites on an average.
For the trial round the children made newspaper kites, once they had mastered this they went on to plastic kits and fine paper kites. Using their creativity in attaching fancy tails to the kite, mix-matching the colors and writing their names to make each kite unique. We had invited Mr. Kaushik’s (landlord) grandchildren as well as the children of all the fruit/food vendors and laborers living in the vicinity of Khoj. We wanted them to work together and enjoy themselves and push their creative thought process.By the end of the workshop we had made over 100 kites in different sizes, shapes, material.
We decided to fly the kites on the 26th of January (Republic day). That was luckily a bright sunny day. We marched up to the terrace of Khoj with all the kites and one by one the children dotted the sky with their very own hand-made kites. Each took great pride in flying the kite he/she had made with his/her own hands. We carried on till we had spent all the kites and the children went back very happy and made us promise that we would call them for the next workshop whatever it is, whenever it is.
The workshop was a whopping success in terms of the fact that the children got familiarized with using their hands to create something which they later put to use, they got to know one another and got to know us, at least by our first names. They went back reassured that there will be more activity where they would do other fun-things. And we will be able to develop there creative as well as personal front by working with the same lot of children over and over again.
Aastha Chauhan (Coordinator)