The strangest news story I’ve seen on this trip (and I’ve seen some woozies) came in Sunday’s Ahmedabad Mirror. Headed “33-yr-old woman dies after manja slits her throat,” the story told the tale of a woman in the city of Paldi killed by kite string (manja). Apparently she was on her way home from teaching an English lesson when a kite string got tangled around her neck, slitting her throat when she attempted to untangle it.
Seems that Gujarat celebrates the festival of Uttarayan January 14 with a huge kite festival in which tens of thousands of kites are in the air, competing with everyone else’s kite. But just having kites in the air isn’t enough. Manja laced with glass is used to cut your competitors’ kite strings. Thus the fate of the poor woman from Paldi.
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