{"id":8898,"date":"2010-03-31T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/03\/31\/temple-elephant-learns-to-return-change-to-devotees-april-fool-s-joke\/"},"modified":"2010-03-31T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T12:00:00","slug":"temple-elephant-learns-to-return-change-to-devotees-april-fool-s-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/03\/31\/temple-elephant-learns-to-return-change-to-devotees-april-fool-s-joke\/","title":{"rendered":"Temple Elephant Learns to Return Change to Devotees (April Fool&#8217;s Joke)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: HPI<\/p>\n<p>MADURAI, TAMIL NADU, INDIA, <b>April 1, 2010<\/b>: Meenakshiji, the temple elephant at the ancient Meenakshi-Sundareswarar Temple in Madurai, has learned to give change to devotees for the traditional tap on the head blessing. <\/p>\n<p>When offered a hundred rupee note, for example, the pachyderm carefully picks up 95 rupees in change from a nearby pile and returns it to the devotee, and then graces him or her with a gentle tap on the head. Her mahout said it only took about ten minutes to teach her how to do this, as she could already count to 200. &#8220;She helps me with the accounting,&#8221; he said. If the nearby pile does not have the right amount for change, devotees can feel safe about coming back later for their money. Meenakshiji has an elephant&#8217;s memory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: HPI MADURAI, TAMIL NADU, INDIA, April 1, 2010: Meenakshiji, the temple elephant at the ancient Meenakshi-Sundareswarar Temple in Madurai,,&#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-8898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8898","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=8898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}