Rajkot Groundnut Patola Kite Making Uttarayan Gujarat

Rajkot district in Saurashtra is famous for the Uttarayan (Makar Sankranti) kite festival on January 14 — Gujarat's most popular festival when the sky over every Gujarati town and village is covered in kites and the distinctive "kaipo che!" shout marks a successful cut, with Rajkot's Chinese manja (synthetic glass-coated) and traditional natural cotton manja kite string trades worth crores annually. Rajkot is also the origin point of the Rajkot patola — a single-ikat silk sari (as opposed to Patan's double ikat) that uses cheaper silk and simpler tie-dyeing to produce patola-like designs accessible to middle-income buyers. The district's Rajkot city was Mahatma Gandhi's childhood home and the Kaba Gandhi No Delo (Gandhi's ancestral home) is a heritage museum.