Makar Sankranti at Tiny Tots

Makar Sankranti falls in mid-January, when the sun begins its northward journey and, in
Maharashtra, everyone hands everyone else a tilgul with the instruction to take the sweet and
speak sweetly. It is one of the warmest ideas in the calendar and children take to it
instantly.

Tilgul ghya, god god bola

The children exchange tilgul — sesame and jaggery — and repeat the line as they do
it. Then they work out that they can hand a tilgul to absolutely anybody, and spend the rest of
the morning going round the building being sweet to the cook, the gardener and each other.

It is the single easiest festival to teach kindness through, because the kindness is the
activity rather than the moral at the end of it.

Black clothes and halva ornaments

Sankranti is the one day black is worn, and the children love being told so — a rule that
inverts another rule is irresistible at four. The little ones wear halva ornaments, sugar-crystal
necklaces and bracelets that are traditional for babies and toddlers, and which they then have
to be dissuaded from eating before lunch. Mostly.

The kites

Every child decorates a paper kite. Almost none of them fly, because a three-year-old’s
kite is heavy on glue and light on aerodynamics, and because running while looking upwards ends
the way you would expect. Two teachers fly a real one so that everybody has seen a kite
properly up.

What they take from it

• Til and gul are seeds and jaggery, and both come from plants they can be shown
• Giving something small to somebody makes them smile, reliably and repeatably
• The sun moves, days get longer, and seasons are a thing that happens

By eleven o’clock every child has sticky hands and has told at least four
people to speak sweetly. It works.