Yaar, watching my sister’s bird sketches flap their wings on paper is pure magic — but when the government talks about “recognising” mallakhamb, I get worried. Last time they ‘recognised’ our village pond, a concrete wall went up and the kids stopped splashing in mud. Let the pole stand in red soil before they put it in some Delhi glass case, no?

Yaar, yesterday I saw my sister drawing a mallakhamb pole with a sparrow perched on top—she’d never seen one, only heard me describe it. All this talk of getting it recognized by some board in Delhi makes me uneasy: what if the rules end up pushing out the village boys who learned from their grandfathers? I’d rather fix a hundred punctures than see one kid lose his spot because a form wasn’t filled right.