Go fly a kite – Part 2

Hi there. I’m glad to say that our Punjabi festival is up and running and so far response has been pretty good. The dishes are turning out well and most of our customers are ordering from the festival menu. Most people looking in from outside will never realise what it takes to get a festival organised, but I guess that’s the same for most things.

Just as one example, we wanted to hang patangs (Indian fighting kites) in our front window and in our skylight but could not find anywhere to buy them in India. In the UK we could have bought patangs made from nylon or mylar but traditional ones are made from paper and then painted, so these wouldn’t really have looked right. So there we were, stumped and not long before the festival was due to begin.

Then Titu, one of our chefs, spoke up and said he’d make the kites if we would get the paper and bamboo for him. And he was really keen to do it because he used to fly kites back in India and, of course, he always made his own kites. We still needed someone to paint them for us and patangs are painted in all sorts of ways, with traditional decoration like ‘moth’s eyes’ on either side of the wings, like fighting cocks and other birds but they’re also painted according to the artist’s whims with political slogans, Bollywood stars – I even saw one with the profile of Alfred Hitchcock. Where would we find someone to do this for us on such short notice.

That’s when Pippa Graber came to our rescue. Pippa organises exhibits in many of the art galleries in our part of south London and she knows a lot of artists. It’s worth taking a look at her site – www.artdoglondon.co.uk - to find out about gallery exhibits, local artists and photographers.

Pippa put us in touch with Kate Pritchard, a Chelsea Arts graduate who does both sculpture installations and painting and she was happy to have a go at painting 14 kites. Her brief was to paint some traditionally and some with more local images. We couldn’t have been more pleased and delighted with the results. Along with a peacock, elephants and banana leaves, she also gave us the London Eye and a Damien Hirst ‘dot painting’. If you want to see some of Kate's work, take a look at her site: www.katepritchard.beep.com

Using kites as the image for the Basant festival has proved to be an idea with legs. The day we were hanging the kites, Pippa passed by and told us about the Blythe Park Fun Day, a family day out with food and events for children. The event is on Saturday 28 June and we’ll post more details in the next few days. We’ll be there and Titu Xxxx will be making kites and demonstrating how to fly a patang, Kate will be there with us painting kites and we’ll be serving some good Indian picnic food – our head chef Jiwan wants to do an enormous pot of biryani, some veg and non-veg kebabs and some cold snacks like chaat and puri.

Then we got a postcard from Lewisham Council about the Bike and Kite Festival on Blackheath which takes place Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June and if we can, we’ll be there as well. More details on this next time as well. Thanks for stopping by again and we hope to see you, either at Babur or Blythe Park or maybe even Blackheath. You never know where we’ll turn up next.