Basant Kites: Yusuf's Rooftop Tracker for Uttarayan

Thirty fighter kites is a lot to hold in your head. Yusuf is hand-building them on his Ahmedabad rooftop before Uttarayan, the kite festival that fills the sky on 14 January. Each diamond gets its own paper, its own spine bamboo, and a rooftop balance test before it earns a spot in the stack. By kite twelve or thirteen, the details blur together. Paper scraps with scribbled notes get lost in the wind.

Basant Kites is the app Yusuf built from a single idea: one screen that knows every kite he has made, every manjha batch he has cooked, and exactly how many days he has left. Try tapping through it below. The live demo runs right here in your browser, fully interactive, with real data already seeded so you can see how it feels when the build is actually underway.

The countdown that keeps you honest

The first thing you see when you open Basant Kites is a number: days until Uttarayan. It is not decorative. When that number is in the twenties, you have room to experiment. When it drops to single digits, every untested kite is a problem waiting to happen on festival morning.

Below the countdown sits the progress ring: kites built versus the goal of thirty. These two numbers together do something paper scraps cannot, they make the pace of your work visible. If you have twelve kites logged with eight days left, the math tells you something. The app does not nag you; it just shows you where you stand.

One kite, three facts

Each kite in the list carries three pieces of information: the paper it is made from, the bamboo used for the spine, and the result of the rooftop balance test. Those three fields are enough. Fighter kites live or die on the tilt, and a kite that pulled left on test day needs a note before you forget which one it was.

The add and edit flow is fast by design. You are on a rooftop after school, hands a little dusty, probably holding the kite. Tap the kite, update the test result, move on. The filter buttons at the top of the list let you pull up true flyers, kites that need a trim, and those not yet flown, so you always know where the gaps are in your thirty.

Scroll through the embedded app now and tap one of the kite cards. The edit screen is one tap away. Change the test verdict and save it. That is the whole flow.

Logging manjha batches

Manjha is not bought; it is cooked. Glass powder, rice paste, colour, and a few days drying on the terrace. Each batch comes out a little different, some sharper, some still tacky. Keeping track of which batch is ready matters because you do not want to wind wet thread onto a finished kite two days before the festival.

The manjha section of the app treats each batch as a small inventory item. You log the sharpness rating and mark it as drying or dry. When a batch crosses into dry territory, it is ready to spool. When you are mixing the next one, you can check what the last batch rated and adjust your recipe. Nothing elaborate, just a running record of what you have made and what is ready to use.

It is the kind of log that feels unnecessary until the third batch, when you realize you cannot remember which pot you adjusted the glass ratio on.

Built to work without Wi-Fi

Rooftops in Old Ahmedabad are not reliably connected. The app stores everything locally on the device, so it opens and saves whether or not there is a signal. The data is seeded with a few example kites and a manjha batch so the app is never staring back at you empty on the first open. You can clear the examples and start fresh, or just edit them to match what you have actually built.

This matters more than it might seem. A tracker that requires a connection to load your own kite list is not a tool you will trust in the last week before Uttarayan, when every hour of good wind is time you could be flying test runs from the terrace.

From one idea to a working tool

Yusuf described the problem, thirty kites, three facts each, a hard deadline, and a manjha log, and Basant Kites came out of that description. The whole thing was running the same day the idea was typed in. That is the point: a problem this specific does not need a generic checklist app or a spreadsheet. It needs something that knows what Uttarayan is, what a balance test means, and why the countdown matters.

If you are a patang builder in Gujarat or Rajasthan, or anywhere else kite season has a date attached to it, the app you are looking at is tuned to your workflow. And if you have a different festival, a different craft, or a different deadline, the same process that built this one can build something shaped around yours.