Kabaddi is a sport that undoubtedly very few of you must have heard of if any at all. Unlike a lot of sports, Kabaddi does not include a ball as part of the game. The game is like football, wrestling, and tag all at once. Kabaddi originated in the modern Tamil region of the Indian subcontinent, a few thousand years ago, as a pastime that has evolved into the national sport of India, with competitions all over the world and currently, the VIVO Pro Kabaddi Tournament is taking place in India. The game can go by different names like Ha-doo-doo, chu-kit-kit, and hu-tu-tu. Kabaddi is played with 2 teams of 12 players each, 7 starters and 5 reserves, playing for two twenty minute halves. At the end, the team with the higher score wins. The Kabaddi court is 13 meters by 10 meters. The midline divides the court into two halves. Around the middle of one of the halves, is a baulk line. A bit after that, is the bonus line. The rectangles at the sides are known as the lobbies. Whichever team wins the coin toss, they send out a person known as a raider first, which in this case is the blue team. His job is to tag as many defenders, which consists of the entire other team, and make it back to the midline. However, he must cross the baulk line while raiding. The raider gets only 30 seconds to raid and at the same time must chant the word Kabaddi repeatedly, without stopping to pause for breath: that is, he only gets one breath. The defenders jobs, who are the yellow team, are to tackle the raider, and not let him back to the midline, thus preventing a successful raid. But, if the raider touches one of the defenders, and makes it back to the midline, not only does the raiding team get a point for each defender touched, those touched defenders are out. All players who are out must go and sit in the sitting block. The catch is that no one can substitute him back in, until someone from his team gets a point. Then, the team may call a player back in. The lobbies can only be used once the player has touched a defender, so that he gets a bit more space to run to his side. In most Kabaddi matches you will see the defenders holding hands. The reason is because, if a defender steps out of bounds, then he is out, and the raiding can continue.This process repeats for the entire game, switching back and forth between the two teams. Following are some special terms that you should know: How to play Kabaddi – Part 1 All Out/Lona: When all of the players are out. Then, seven of the players get revived, but only seven, because that is the limit for one team on a court. Super Tackle: A super tackle is when three or less defenders are defending a raider, and they make the tackle. Super Raid: When the raider scores 3 or more points in a raid, it is known as a super raid. Do-or-Die Raid: If a raid has been unsuccessful for two consecutive times, then the third raid must be successful, or the raider is out, and the defending team receives a point. In my next blog, I will continue this one by explaining how scoring is kept, and how to score. Leave a thought in the comment section, and see you next month!
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: August 31, 2019
“Bird in the Clouds” Photograph by Hannah Parker, 13 (Burlington, VT), published in Stone Soup Magazine, May 2019. A note from Emma Wood As a teacher of literature, I am constantly thinking of new ways to categorize ways of writing, so that I can say to my students, “Poetry is this,” and “Fiction is that.” Since I love to organize and arrange, these kinds of neat categories are very satisfying to me. However, reading—and especially reading submissions for Stone Soup—serves as a constant reminder that these categories can be both limiting and unproductive. There are short stories that read like poems, poems that read like stories and look like art, and art that tells stories. Often, art that crosses these generic boundaries (meaning, the boundaries of genres) is the most powerful and the most creative. This weekend, I encourage you to create outside of the usual boxes. For writers: Instead of sitting down with the intent to write a story or a poem or a personal narrative, sit down to simply . . . write. Since some structure is always helpful, maybe set a timer for 10 minutes and look at Hannah Parker’s stunning image “Bird in the Clouds” (above) for inspiration. Try to write without stopping for the whole 10 minutes, letting the words and your mood lead. For visual artists: instead of taking photos of a picturesque scene or an interesting object, think of creating your own scene. How might you tell a story with an image? How much can you convey without any words at all? Similarly, if you paint or draw, challenge yourself to draw a story, rather than a thing. I encourage you to look at the paintings of Pieter Bruegel for inspiration. Alternatively, think of ways to incorporate text into your visual art. Maybe that means using watercolors over a newspaper story or adding text to a photograph. Whatever you do, do it in the spirit of experimentation and play! Until next week, Customer service and online accounts This week we launched a new Customer Service FAQ to answer some of the questions we have been receiving most often in the last few weeks since launching our new website and order-processing functions. The FAQ starts off with advice on how to log in to the new “My Account” facility and moves through more detailed questions about checking your subscription details, updating your payment information, and more. If you have been wondering about how something works on the new site, take a look! Plus, you can always write to us at subscriptions@stonesoup.com with any questions about your account or our services in general. We love hearing from you and we want to help. Do you have an outstanding query with Stone Soup? In the past couple weeks, we have become aware that our former fulfillment house has for some time been taking messages and answering customer queries even though they no longer work for us. Some of the information given out to subscribers was incorrect, other issues were not followed up on as promised, and they had not been passing any details of the messages or calls on to us. If you have an open query with Stone Soup, especially one left by phone or sent to an email address with the letters “icn” included in it, would you please resubmit it by writing to us direct at subscriptions@stonesoup.com? We will deal with it for you right away. Thank you. Please note that any old customer service email address(es) and telephone numbers that you may have noted are no longer functional. Please delete them from your records. We do not currently have a facility to take telephone queries. We intend to reintroduce that facility within the coming months, and for now we ask you please to email us with all of your requests and questions at subscriptions@stonesoup.com. We will keep you informed about improvements to the site and to our customer service as we work on it over the coming weeks and months. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We’ve published another short interview with a former contributor to the blog. Siena DeBenedittis wrote the story “Illuminated,” which was published in our March/April 2015 issue. Now she’s a college student studying environmental studies and English. Her interview is full of great advice, including, “Rejection is an opportunity to improve.” Read it here. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson Reviewed by Kate Choi, 14 (Seoul, South Korea) What is hope? Why do we feel hope? And why is hope so important to us? In a story from Greek mythology, hope was famously the only item to remain in Pandora’s box after it released the evils of the world, demonstrating just how valuable hope is to us: had hope escaped from our possession, humanity would have been unable to survive the evils of the world. Emily Dickinson believed in the power and value of hope just as strongly. Famously reclusive, this 19th-century American poet remained largely unpublished during her lifetime, by her own choice. After her death in 1886, however, her poems were discovered and published by her close friends and family. Since then, Dickinson has grown to become one of the most mysterious, emblematic, and loved poets of all time with her short but powerful poems. Much of her poetry is devoted to exploring the nature of life, death, and what she called the “Circumference,” the boundary where the reality that we know meets that of the sublime—God, for example, or for the less religiously inclined, Truth with a capital T. Dickinson was the first poet to really capture my attention when I was younger, and she is now one of my all-time favorite writers. In her beautiful poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Dickinson explores the power of hope and what it means to us as humans. …/more Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America,
Former Contributor Interview: Siena DeBenedittis
Editor’s Note: our Former Contributors Interview Project showcases former contributors of Stone Soup and the wonderful things they’ve gone on to do. Siena DeBenedittis’s story “Illuminated” was published in the March/April 2015 issue of Stone Soup. SS: What are you doing now? SD: I’m majoring in Environmental Studies and English at Brandeis University. College is great because you get to study the topics that most interest you (and in my case, that means reading many wonderful books), but it’s also a lot of work, which allows me less spare time to focus on my own writing. When I do find time to complete stories, though, I try to submit them for publication in various literary magazines. I’m also an editor of one of the lit mags at my school, so I get to see the publication process from the other side, which is really fun. It’s awesome and inspiring to read submissions from other university students around the world and to have a hand in putting together the journal every semester. SS: What did Stone Soup mean to you? SD: Being published in Stone Soup was definitely one of the most defining accomplishments of my life up to that point. The magazine already meant a lot to me; I had been reading it for years before I started submitting stories, and then I submitted many stories before I actually got published. Because I tried so many times before one of my stories was accepted, it felt even better to finally receive the acceptance letter, because I knew that I had really earned it. It was proof that my writing had improved and now, people would get to read it. (My college roommate actually also subscribed to Stone Soup as a young adult, so she probably read my work WAY before we even met, which is so crazy!) Looking back on it, Stone Soup taught me how to learn from rejection, and about how thrilling it is to have your work out there for people to see! SS: Do you have any advice for current readers, writers, and artists who contribute to Stone Soup? SD: Keep submitting! Rejection is an opportunity to improve. Also, after I aged out of Stone Soup, I didn’t know of any other opportunities for young people to be published, so even though I didn’t stop writing, I definitely slowed down, and I stopped pursuing publication. Don’t do that. Those opportunities exist! They’re out there! And if you’re anything like me, there’s nothing like the feeling you get when you know other people are seeing your work. Remember that feeling and work towards it, let it motivate you more than you let rejection discourage you. Are you a former Stone Soup writer or artist and interested in being interviewed? We’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to sarah@stonesoup.com for more information.
