Yeah, I know, Part 0 sounds weird. I am thinking in terms of a prologue, a background to this year’s Thaipusam celebration. This year is not like any other year before it. Due to Hindraf and the rise of Makkal Sakthi, there are calls to boycott Batu Caves. This follows the action of the temple committee to call the police when HINDRAF rally participants gathered at Batu Caves on the night before the rally (24\/11). This is like adding fuel to fire, since the committee has been repeatedly accused of misusing temple funds for so long.<\/p>\n
Thus this years Thaipusam sets out to be contest: whether Samy Vellu (leader of the party that claims to solely represent Indian community in Malaysia) can convince people to still come to Batu Caves, or can the Makkal Sakthi (People Power) turn the tide and humiliate Samy Vellu and temple committee?<\/p>\n
Not to mention, this year’s Thaipusam is on a day which is meaningful for me and Then \ud83d\ude06 So, need to juggle the time properly.<\/p>\n
So, we started the day early, at 5.15am. I still had a bit of time to see Arsenal get trashed 5-1 (that’s FIVE-ONE) by Spurs. Left home at 6.10am to our destination – Sri Balasubramaniar Swamy temple at Port Klang, which is having a grand Thaipusam for the first time this year<\/a>. Continue at Part 1<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yeah, I know, Part 0 sounds weird. I am thinking in terms of a prologue, a background to this year’s Thaipusam celebration. This year is not like any other year before it. Due to Hindraf and the rise of Makkal Sakthi, there are calls to boycott Batu Caves. This follows the action of the temple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11,13],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-i-was-here","category-indian","category-personal","tag-thaipusam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}