Chennai: In yet another incident of manja kite thread causing a fatality in the city, 41-year-old software professional C.Siva Prakasam, a resident of Villivakkam, died and his father was injured on the Anakaputhur stretch of the Chennai Bypass on Tuesday evening.
Siva Prakasam, working in a tech firm in Neelankarai on East Coast Road, had come to Agaramthen village near Selaiyur to visit his piece of land with his father Chandrasekhar (73) on a two wheeler.
The two were returning home via Chennai Bypass when a kite thread slashed his neck. He started bleeding and lost control of the vehicle and fell down.
He died on the spot while his father was taken to a private hospital.
Siva Prakasam is survived by his wife and two daughters. Though the police had been announcing the ban on manja kites on a regular basis, they have not been able stop the menace till now despite the fact that the last few years had witnessed many such deaths on Chennai roads many times.
Police suspect that two groups were engaged in betting on flying manja kites (gummed, coloured and coated with powdered glass) on Chennai Bypass when the fatal mishap happened. The open-spaced Chennai Bypass always attracted kite flyers because of the stiff wind blowing there.
The Chennai Bypass is notorious not only for bike and auto rickshaw racing but also kite flying where different groups engage in competition over a bet, police sources said.
“Participants would entangle the glass powder coated manja while flying their kites in the sky and try to cut off the string of each other’s kites by pulling it. The winner’s kite keeps flying while the loser’s kite gets cut and drifts away with the wind and it can cause fatal accidents like the one which happened on Tuesday at Chennai Bypass,’ police revealed.
