Kites on a roof in Abbasiya

On a rooftop in Abbasiya, a retired engineer teaches boys from the street to build kites on Friday mornings.

Nobody has to be there. There is no register, no fee, no parent waiting with a threat. The boys come because they want to see what happens when he tries something. And he is always trying something. A tail made from old cassette tape. A frame cut from palm ribs in place of cane. Last month, a kite with two strings that nobody, including him, was sure would fly.

Most of it does not fly. That is the attraction.

Compare that with the boys' school timetable, which is a perfectly reasonable thing. A teacher with authority tells a class to complete an exercise that is known to work, and the class does it because it must. That is management. It is necessary, a great deal of life depends on it, but it is not the same act as what happens on the roof.

On the roof, two things are going on at once, and they are close cousins. The first is leadership: going somewhere uncertain and inviting others along, knowing they are free to stay home. The second is creativity: attempting what could easily fail, in the open, where people can watch it fail. Each needs the other. Nobody follows you somewhere obvious, and nobody risks failing in front of people who were made to attend.

The moment he knows a kite will fly, he is back to instruction. Useful, but anybody with the manual could do it.

What keeps the boys climbing the stairs every Friday is not the kites. It is that the man in charge is willing to be wrong in front of them, and they are free to leave, and they do not.