Some devotees had been fasting for weeks and shaved their heads. The most zealous pierced their cheeks with skewers or attached large wooden icons to their bodies with dozens of flesh-piercing hooks. On January 23rd tens of thousands of ethnic-Indian Malaysians gathered at the Batu Caves temple outside Kuala Lumpur to celebrate Thaipusam, one of Hinduism's biggest festivals. In past years more than a million have turned out. This year, although ministers and pro-government newspapers denied it, the crowd was much thinner.
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