CARRYING THE KAVADI

As today is a holiday because of Thaipusam, I got to get more hours of beauty sleep. After I woke up, I went to the market to buy food. It was lucky for me to witness a man carrying a kavadi when I was returning from the market.

Of course, Miss Curiosity quickly found a place to park her car and ran after the procession to get some shots. Luckily, the pictures turned our rather well. Everything and everyone was moving rather fast and I was worried that the pictures might be blur.

As I am a Malaysian and like most Malaysians, we are seasoned and used to men carrying kavadis with hooks and spokes attached to their bodies and even skewers across their cheeks. I have actually seen even more piercings and heavier weights carried by devotees during past Thaipusams. I have also heard that those who do such penance would work themselves into a trancelike state and do not feel any pain. Prior to this they need to cleanse themselves through prayers and fasting.

For your information, kavadi refers to a horizontal pole held on the shoulder on two ends of which load is carried and it assumes the form of human body; the wooden structure represents the bones; the cloth cover represents the skin; the string woven around it represent the veins and the milk contained in the two pots hung by the two ends is the blood. Therefore the act of lifting a Kavadi is professed as submitting oneself at the feet of the Indian God. The kavadi carried by the man in the above pictures is a modified form. Nevertheless, the weight on top appears to be rather heavy and I guess he has to walk quite a distance with it.

At the end of the Kavadi procession, abhishekam is held to Lord Murugan at the sanctum sanctorum. A devotee who carries kavadi or patkudam aspires to view the milk being poured on the Hindu God inside the shrine where he or she reaches after an arduous journey.

From what I know, HIndus and some Chinese of the Taoist faith take a vow to offer a kavadi to the Lord for the purpose of tiding over or averting a great calamity. For instance, if the devotee's child has a fatal disease, he would pray to his God to grant the child a lease of life in return for which the devotee would take a vow to dedicate a kavadi to the Hindu God.