FROM EAST TO WEST
While the world was looking towards the West, the Eastern half kept its eyes fixed on the sky. The stories of the East were much loved in the West. In the wake of the Tales of A Thousand and One Nights with their flying carpets, sailors returned with stories of kites. Marco Polo, for example, brought back a whole slew of kite stories but not a single kite. It was sailors who brought the kite to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sailors with wooden legs and hooks for hands. Men who carried a colorful parrot on their shoulder like a badge, as if to prove their deadly adventures in faraway lands. Bringing monkeys and parrots from Africa, silk from China and spices from India , these seafarers decked the skies of Europe with gaily colored kites that they brought back from Japan and Malaysia .

'EVIL SPIRITS' AND ELECTRICITY
But Europeans must have found other vehicles for their spirits, because the kite for them was nothing more than a colorful plaything released into the sky on a windy day. A sacred agent for dispatching spirits into the air in the