{"id":14692,"date":"2016-01-31T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-31T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2016\/01\/31\/thousands-of-hindu-devotees-throng-temples-to-celebrate-thaipusam\/"},"modified":"2016-01-31T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-31T12:00:00","slug":"thousands-of-hindu-devotees-throng-temples-to-celebrate-thaipusam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2016\/01\/31\/thousands-of-hindu-devotees-throng-temples-to-celebrate-thaipusam\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousands of Hindu Devotees Throng Temples to Celebrate Thaipusam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.themalaymailonline.com\/malaysia\/article\/thousands-of-devotees-throng-temples-to-celebrate-thaipusam\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>SELANGOR, MALAYSIA, January 24, 2016 (Malay Mail): More than a million Hindus in Malaysia celebrated the colorful Thaipusam festival today, thronging temples to display their devotion with wince-inducing body piercing and offerings to the Deity Murugan. Hundreds of thousands converged on the Batu Caves   an important religious site for Tamil Hindus on Kuala Lumpur&#8217;s outskirts   with many walking up to 10 hours to the site, capped by a final 272-step climb to its limestone hilltop shrine.<\/p>\n<p>Many show their fervor through mind-over-matter feats of body piercing including long skewers stuck through their flesh in a form of penance, or by bearing the elaborately decorated home-made frames called &#8220;kavadi.&#8221; Kavadi can weigh as much as 220 lbs. and are typically affixed to a person&#8217;s body using sharp metal spikes dug into the skin.<\/p>\n<p>Many endured sweltering heat to follow the 15-kilometre (nine-mile) procession of a silver chariot from a temple in central Kuala Lumpur to the caves. Most of Malaysia&#8217;s roughly 29 million people are Muslim, but the country also has more than two million ethnic Indians.<\/p>\n<p>Photos and video at &#8220;source&#8221; above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source SELANGOR, MALAYSIA, January 24, 2016 (Malay Mail): More than a million Hindus in Malaysia celebrated the colorful Thaipusam festival,&#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-14692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14692","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=14692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}