Getting to the Point

The woman who passed me in the bright yellow sari looked remarkably composed for someone who had a metal skewer going into one cheek and coming out the other. Her poise and focus was mirrored in dozens of other pilgrims with similarly excruciating-looking piercings. Some even had metal hooks pushed into the flesh of their backs, supporting huge wooden frames that towered over their heads or anchoring ropes held like reins by companions. Despite this, not a single one of them displayed any signs of distress. Instead, they appeared to be on another mental plane all together and, coupled with the accompanying drummers and the tides of rhythmic chanting, it made for an almost trance-like atmosphere.

They were celebrating the Tamil Hindu festival of Thaipusam that had kicked off the night before at the stroke of midnight outside Kuala Lumpur’s Sri Maha Mariamman Temple. There, I’d joined thousands of Malaysia’s Tamil community who were gathered to accompany an immaculately decorated chariot on its journey to the Batu Caves outside of the city. This chariot carried a statue of Lord Murugan, a Hindu God renowned for defeating the demon Surapadman and his acolytes when they tried to spread evil across the Earth. Thaipusam celebrates Lord Murugan’s victory over them and is an opportunity to give thanks for everything that’s positive in life, as well as to pray for more of the same in the future.

After an all-night march with the pilgrims, the cave complex eventually shimmered into view through the morning heat. A final challenge awaited however: a climb up some 300 steps to a temple hidden in the side of a mountain. Here priests waitied to relieve the pilgrims of their kavadi, as their spiky burdens are known, and to then treat their wounds with ash.

At a tea stall at the bottom of the steps, I watched a dapper middle-aged man in flowing white robes and matching bushy whiskers descend from the temple, his mission complete. Judging by his jaunty gait and the friendly smile he flashed as he ordered a brew, I reckoned he might suffer a couple of questions from an ignorant foreigner without too much objection. I went over and introduced myself and was immediately surprised to find out that my new friend, Narendra, was actually a chemical engineer from Kuala Lumpur as opposed to the full time mystic that I’d presumed, and that the majority of the other pilgrims were similarly normal folk.

So why on earth, I asked him, did they choose to inflict all this suffering on themselves in the name of celebrating the victory of good over evil? I mean why not do something that felt, well, “good” instead? Narendra motioned for me to sit down on a low wooden stool next to the counter and then, as we sipped our sweet, milky chai, set to explaining. I needed to remember, he told me, that Lord Murugan’s epic victory had been won only after a very tough battle, and that this served as a telling example of how the really good, sustainable things in life don’t come easy, but rather require some short-term pain to unlock their long-term gains.

Despite already knowing this with the rational parts of our brains, our febrile human emotions are nevertheless seduced by other short-term pleasures that are light on the upfront costs but heavy on the negative after-effects. The result is that we end up sacrificing our deeper, long-term happiness for the pursuit of shallow, short-lived pleasures. He motioned to the neighbouring stall that was selling thickly battered bhajis and noted that even though we are well aware that fast food is bad for us for example, we’re still ridiculously easily persuaded to override this knowledge by anticipation of the mere couple of seconds of pleasure that biting into its oily crispiness will bring. (At this point I made a mental note to wait until he’d gone before ordering one - they did look absolutely delicious).

To correct such a deeply ingrained bias for immediate gratification, no matter the cost, Narendra told me that we require a really visceral lesson. And that’s where the piercings and pain come in - by enduring them, pilgrims learn to overcome their immediate urges and build their mental strength. They prove to themselves that they don’t have to be a slave to every desire that comes into their heads. Instead, they keep their eyes focused on the bigger picture and so, by putting on physical chains, they break free of mental ones.

So it turned out that, despite how unfathomable the rituals had at first seemed to an outsider like me, they were in fact rooted in a universal axiom that humans have been attempting to internalise for millennia: “per aspera ad astra” - through hardship to the stars. I was almost tempted to now give it a go myself, but as Narendra had advised a set-by-step approach, I settled with cancelling my planned order for a bhaji to go.