Thaipusam, The Hindu Day of Atonement

One of the things that we notice here is that there truly is respect for the festivals and holidays (religious or otherwise) of the different cultures.

There’s a large Indian / Hindu population here, and Saturday was one of their big holiday, Thaipusam, or The Day of Atonement.

This festival is celebrated mostly by the Tamil community on the full moon in January / February.  THe name comes from the name Thai - which refers to the month - and Pusam - which is the star that is at its highest point of the festival.  The festival is a celebration of the birth of Lord Subramaniam, one of the paramount Hindu deities.

Here’s the difference in this holiday and say, Christmas or Ash Wednesday.  Pilgrims make and fulfill vows as a show of their faith -- they pray for divine faith to fulfill their vows, and when their prayers are fulfilled they pay up and do what they said..

Prior to the actual day, they prepare by observing a strict schedule of fasting, dieting and self discipline in order to purify themselves so they may go into a trance-like state and transcend the pain that's about to come -- and we don't mean having to deal with the relatives over the holidays, either.

Part of the street is blocked off for pilgrims who are passing by on their penance journey from one location to another. They are preceded and followed by friends and relatives who are bearing gifts, usually milk and rice. These are sometimes carried on the friend’s heads.

Theyn they are pierced through the cheeks, tongue, face, or just about any other soft body part with sharp objects.  After that, his "friends" load a kavadi (a cage-like structure carried during the devotion, which is usually decorated with peacock feathers and aluminum plates with images of Hindy deities on them) and put it on him while he walks about 4 kilometers on his journey of faith.
And to think that Christians don't want to answer an alter call sometimes!  Talk about putting your faith right out there for the world to see.
We’d seen pictures of this on the Discovery Channel before, but to see it close up and in real life is something that you can never forget.

You also can’t doubt the sincerity of these guys, either. Nobody sticks themselves that much without some type of divine intervention.

I’m just glad that it hasn’t caught on in the States yet.

The pictures and videos of this doesn’t do it justice. We were in our tour bus taking pictures, and, of course, by the time we stopped nobody was coming along. It’s not like the Macy’s Parade where things are scheduled and move along, but rather more like a tent revival meeting where someone comes forward as the spirit moves them.

It was pretty spectacular. Traffic was gridlocked in the neighborhood, and we understood why the tour buses weren’t going through there for the most part, but we were really glad that ours took us through there.