Thaipusam at Batu Caves

This year, was the first time I was there to witness Thaipusam.

Thaipusam at Batu Caves has been famous for so many years… famous for the huge crowd of people going there to pray, as well as famous for creating litters after the event.

The litters were thrown all around the area, and every single year, the local municipal has to send over hundreds of staffs just to come clean up the area.

Other than just going there to take photographs, I was there to help inform the public about the act of recycling. I know that I shouldn’t be posting this following photograph, but this shot is just too beautiful to be kept as an archive.

A group about 20 people went out to help create awareness, but due to the huge crowd, it’s not really effective.

I did a quick survey around, observing and listening to the public, and made a short note on why can’t the area be clean throughout the event.

Lack of rubbish bins, therefore lack of convenience to throw them.

Rubbish bins misplaced in some un-crowded areas, and you could see these bins were empty.

Filled rubbish bins are not cleared quickly leading to overflowing rubbish bins.

It’s not like the people there were not educated to properly utilize the rubbish bins, they just couldn’t find one, or the bins were just too full to contain anymore rubbish.

No point for us to be there telling them to throw litters into bins or have litters placed in recycling bins when all the bins were actually full of rubbish!

By the way, most of them walked to Batu Caves and many of them took the public transport there. This was good, wasn’t it? But how about the train service? Badly managed ticketing system, no proper queues, people rushing to get into the trains. All these bad services just made things worse. Anyways, I just feel that something has to be done about this, people of the public has to be included as well.

 

For a while, I felt like I was in India…

In short, Godspeed, Malaysia.