The article also talks about the area around the mosque, which is also called Thousand Lights, and which includes one of my favourite places, a cafe and boutique called Amethyst, which is a rare example of preserving and re-using an old building, instead of tearing it down -- the former Jeypore Palace:
The Hindu also has an article on the decline of kite-flying in Chennai. More fun, though, is the companion article, on how to prepare manjha, the ground-glass paste which is applied to kite strings so that they can cut down other people's kites (and your neck, too, if a kite string gets tangled up in trees on opposite sides of a road -- which happens sometimes):
Conventional manjha is an abrasive material that usually comprises of fine glass powder ground into a paste with idli, cooked rice or hide glue solution. This is then coated over a thread of sufficient tensile strength to make it (the thread) a cutting tool.
Manjha-makers like to invest their "recipes" with a certain mystique. Exotic ingredients such as cactus, barks of select trees and, most bizarre of all, blood of garden lizard, find their way into manjha recipes. ..(more)
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