{"id":14022,"date":"2015-02-06T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/02\/06\/malaysian-hindus-mark-thaipusam\/"},"modified":"2015-02-06T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T12:00:00","slug":"malaysian-hindus-mark-thaipusam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/02\/06\/malaysian-hindus-mark-thaipusam\/","title":{"rendered":"Malaysian Hindus Mark Thaipusam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bangkokpost.com\/news\/asean\/465202\/malaysian-hindus-mark-thaipusam\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>MALAYSIA, February 3, 2015 (Bangkok Post): More than a million Hindus thronged temples throughout Malaysia on Tuesday to celebrate Thaipusam, a colorful annual religious festival. Celebrations in the capital Kuala Lumpur centered, as they have for 125 years, on the spectacular Batu caves complex on the city&#8217;s outskirts, which many Hindus walked up to ten hours to reach in an annual pilgrimage.<\/p>\n<p>Bearing gifts for the Deity Murugan, countless yellow-robed devotees carried milk pots or coconuts &#8212; the latter of which are smashed as offerings. Others took part in the 9-mile procession of a silver chariot from a temple in the city centre to the caves &#8212; an important religious site for Tamil Hindus &#8212; capped by the final 272-step climb to a temple in the limestone outcropping.<\/p>\n<p>Celebrated also in India, Singapore and other areas with significant Hindu Tamil communities, the festival is marked with particular relish in multi-cultural Malaysia. Many show their fervor by bearing the elaborately decorated frames called Kavadi that can weigh as much as 220 lbs. and are typically affixed to a person&#8217;s body using sharp metal spikes dug into their flesh in a form of penance. About 1.6 million people were expected to visit the Batu caves on Tuesday, which also draws tens of thousands of tourists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source MALAYSIA, February 3, 2015 (Bangkok Post): More than a million Hindus thronged temples throughout Malaysia on Tuesday to celebrate,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}