World over, the conversation around public sculptures often emphasizes the need for literality and recognizable visual elements. Patrons argue ad-nauseum with artists that abstraction would be lost on a lay audience and that direct representation is the only way to make a public artwork ‘successful’. In this context, this work seeks to tread a very fine balance. Titled ‘Pragati Ni Patang’, there is a line of kites spiraling upwards – the work references the literal rhombic shape of kites, while also alluding to paper lanterns that are popular during the end of winter ‘Uttarayan’ festival. During Uttarayan, a candle is enclosed within each paper lantern and the accumulated hot air enables the glowing paper lantern to float up into the evening sky, filling the skies in every town of Gujarat with thousands of such glowing objects. The ‘abstract’ forms of this installation transform from 2D to 3D, the surface of each kite itself a grid of gently tessellated rhombic shapes, and the overall volume created is a take on the geometric ‘di-pyramid’. The colours ranging from a deep red to the most vibrant sunny yellow are culturally embedded in the ethos of Gujarat and is celebrated through a lively movement of this warm spectrum from the lower end to the upper. Within the installation also sits a DNA spiral of folded, pleated and intricately cut brass, a simulation of the paper ruffles that often accompanies a kite at its base, but here representing the energy of the present, fuelling growth and dynamism, both metaphors for a ‘vibrant Gujarat’. It is apt that the DNA Spiral of the kites as well as the central spiral is held by a line of bronze cast figures of children created by the sculptor Vivek Aggarwal of Universal India. The children are pulled up by the rising vortex of the spiraling kites and the first few of them have already taken flight along with the aerial elements! This is both metaphor and message : the hope and aspiration of a new India seeking to break free from the shackles and limitations of the past.