Pulli Dawn

Before sunrise, a Tamil doorstep is swept, sprinkled with water, and given its kolam: a pattern of rice flour wound in a single line around a grid of dots. Pulli Dawn is a practice book for that moment — on your own step, a balcony tile, or a sheet of paper, whenever and wherever you keep the custom.

The opening screen is the doorstep. A dark, wet threshold holds a pulli grid; a brass lamp flickers at the edge; your finger lays the line of flour. Trace a sikku (chikku) kolam — one line that winds around every dot without touching it and closes back on itself — and the app tells you the instant the loop closes. A missed or grazed dot simply glows; nothing here is marked a failure.

Choose your grid. Straight lattices (5-5, 7-7, 9-9, 11-11) and diamond idukku grids (1-3-5-3-1 up to 15-to-1) set the canvas. Draw freely, or switch on a faint traditional guide and trace over it.

A book of sixty patterns. Sikku kolams (neli), ruled padi kolams, and dot-joining figures — a lotus, the overflowing Pongal pot with its sugarcane, an eight-point star, a Margazhi lattice — each with its name, its grid, and the morning it belongs to. Search by name, filter by family or grid, and keep favourites.

A Margazhi calendar. The thirty mornings of the Tamil month of Margazhi laid out as a row of thresholds. Finish a kolam and that morning holds its thumbnail; or photograph the real kolam on your own step with the in-app camera. Outside Margazhi, the same row quietly keeps your everyday practice streak.

My kolams. Every drawing and photograph you keep, ready to revisit, trace again, or share as an image.

Learn as you go. A bundled how-to covers holding the flour between thumb and forefinger, laying out a dot grid in chalk, and a glossary of pulli, sikku, padi and idukku — all readable offline.

Pulli Dawn is a drawing tool, not a colour-powder rangoli painter, has no social feed or accounts, and includes no religious instruction or astrology. It works completely offline, every time.