{"id":7945,"date":"2009-06-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/06\/25\/devotees-brave-scorching-heat-for-puri-chariot-festival\/"},"modified":"2009-06-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-25T12:00:00","slug":"devotees-brave-scorching-heat-for-puri-chariot-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/06\/25\/devotees-brave-scorching-heat-for-puri-chariot-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Devotees Brave Scorching Heat For Puri Chariot Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sindhtoday.net\/news\/1\/23252.htm\">www.sindhtoday.net<\/a><\/p>\n<p>PURI, INDIA, June 24, 2009: Nearly 300,000 devotees, braving the scorching heat, gathered in Puri town of Orissa to have a glimpse of Lord Jagannath at an 11-day Rath Yatra (chariot festival) which began Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Despite the heat wave, nearly 300,000 devotees have already arrived. We are expecting a gathering of about a million by the evening,&#8221; public relations officer of Jagannath temple administration Laxmidhar Pujapanda told IANS.<\/p>\n<p>He said the deities of Lord Jagannath, his brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra would be pulled by the devotees in three gigantic chariots in Puri town that recorded a temperature of 93 degrees Tuesday. However, other parts of the state recorded temperatures of over 104 degrees.<\/p>\n<p>The chariots of the three deities are pulled by the devotees with the help of ropes. The annual procession is a celebration of Jagannath&#8217;s journey from Dwarka to Kurukshetra along with Subhadra and Balabhadra some 5,000 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: www.sindhtoday.net PURI, INDIA, June 24, 2009: Nearly 300,000 devotees, braving the scorching heat, gathered in Puri town of Orissa,&#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-7945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945","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=7945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}