Kite Runner

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

“There’s a way to be good again.” This is the promo-blurb one sees on the movie posters promoting the movie, “The Kite Runner.” I first saw it as a movie trailer when I went to watch “Bucket List.” The movie is a cinematographic presentation of a 2003 bestseller novel of the same title by an Afghan-American, Khaled Hosseini, a physician by training and profession. It tells the story of an extraordinary bond between two men, who in their innocent, happy and youthful years were kite fighters and kite runners. Kite runners refer to those who retrieve kites downed in a kite fight.

As I am often wont to, it’s not the story that usually catches my interest. Most of the time, it is something quite trivial or a seemingly small detail that gets my attention, such as a colorful poster, a picture of the actors, etc. Presently, it is the term “kite runner” that has attracted my curiosity. But in the meantime, please allow me to digress a bit from the movie itself.

In some ways, the term “kite runner” brought me back in time – to my childhood in a neighborhood called Dinaga St., in Naga City, my birthplace. Looking back, I remember my own kite flying days which were always done along the river. Our small esquinita, called Dinaga Interior, where some twenty families lived, including ours, was a small dirt alley that ended on the banks of Naga River. Across the river is another area called Balintawak. At the start of summer, the big boys in our neighborhood would begin making their kites. I knew how to make a kite. But it was a very simple one. It was just a sheet of grade-six pad paper folded about an inch on each side with a small hole in each where a string will be tied. And that’s it.

But the big boys had these elaborate, not to mention colorful kites, with carefully and skillfully thinned bamboo sticks as frame and “Japanese” paper as body of the kite. Sometimes they had long and very colorful “tails.” But the secret was always keeping a good balance. When a kite is considered “naka-kiling” or has a tendency to fly excessively on one side, they try to “balance” it by putting small pieces of bamboo on the opposite side to act as a counterbalance. The perfect kite, of course, is one with the perfect balance and requires no further adjustments.

In the mid-summer, kite flying would be at its peak. Almost every afternoon, when the wind picks up in that wide area of the river, young men from both sides of the river banks would be holding “kite-fights.” This is like an annual Dinaga vs. Balintawak Summertime Battle of the Kites. It’s just like the usual ordinary kite flying with one big difference: the string they use is, not only sturdy, but is also laced with a concoction of boiled cornstarch (usually used for clothes ironing purposes), and pulverized glass. And the choice source of glass is busted fluorescent bulbs. The ball of kite string is then submerged in this pasty substance and then allowed to dry for about an hour. The result is a kite string that is capable of literally slicing a loaf of bread. And if you’re not careful or properly protected, your hands could really get a nasty cut.

The entire object of this activity is to be able to cut the string of the adversary’s kite, in this case, the kites flown by the guys from Balintawak St., across the river. While this activity is participated in by mostly young teenagers, adults are also in on it. For one, it is they who are almost always the ones who can make the perfectly balanced kite and the correct mix of corn starch and pulverized florescent bulbs for the string. And it is not unusual that the kite fights of the teeners are brought to another, sometimes more violent, level by the adults. But that’s another story.

In my case, I was too young to make much less fly the kind of kite they use for the kite fights. So, we (me and some others of my own age), become the “kite-runners.” We go after and try to retrieve the “downed” kite and bring it back to the older guys, and present it to them as if it were their prize. If they decide to have you keep it, then it feels doubly rewarding for you (no matter how wet the downed kites are sometimes). Because you actually now have as your own, a really well-crafted (sometimes excellently-crafted) kite.

Well, so much for my own kite-runner days. I’m very happy that I still have the faculty to remember those happy times. Of course, I remember more than what I wrote above, i.e. names of the very skilled kite flyers, the old men who acted as “advisors” to the kite flyers, funny moments while retrieving the fallen kites, and of course my Mom’s unforgettable “words” and the almost inevitable and inescapable stick whenever she finds out I was out there on the river banks again.

As for “The Kite Runner” the movie, it is a very serious movie. It brings forth the themes loyalty, shame, family, respect, deliverance, race, hate, and other emotions to fore in very dramatic fashion. To me, it is a story of friendship but not a simple one. The blurb, “There is a way to be good again,” has a very current significance. This was uttered by one of the characters to the main protagonist, Amir, which in a way gives Amir the chance to redeem himself from what he considered a failure on his part to help his friend Hassan during their own kite-runner days. When I think about these words, and even though the movie is set in far-off Afghanistan (and the US), the picture of former NEDA Director, Sec. Neri, and NBN-ZTE deal whistle-blower Jun Lozada, emerges. For Jun Lozada, he has found, though very reluctantly, “a way to be good again,” and this, too, I think, is his unspoken message to his dear friend Sec. Neri, that “there is a way to be good again.” I wish Sec. Neri would watch this movie.

As the movie deals with a range of themes and emotions, every one of us could find an appropriate or applicable nugget of wisdom in this movie.

NOTE: Read a news update on the movie at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22120520/