Good Sports: HELPING KITES FLY AGAIN
Two decades ago, brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad founded a bird rehabilitation organization called Wildlife Rescue in New Delhi. Since then, they’ve dedicated much of their time to treating more than 2,000 birds of prey a year. Most of these birds are kites, injured when they become tangled in manja, the abrasive string coated with powdered glass that’s often used to fly paper kites in kite-fighting competitions.
The brothers spend as many as a dozen hours a day treating the birds, neglecting other responsibilities.
“We have destroyed our family life,” Shehzad told the New York Times. “We have destroyed our relations with our friends, our relatives, our wives, our parents, even our 2- and 4-year-old children.”
And yet the brothers keep trying to save the helpless birds.
“It’s some kind of sense of duty,” Shehzad said. “If not us, then nobody’s going to take care of them.”
Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
[Comments? Contributions? We would love to hear from you about Chai Time. If you have contributions, please email us at melvin@melvindurai.com. We welcome jokes, quotes, online clips, and more.]
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