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KUALA LUMPUR – The Clean Thaipusam charity organisation is preparing to recover up to 500kg of fruit offerings following the ongoing Thaipusam celebrations in Batu Caves.
Film director J. K. Wicky and T. Sathiyavarman co-founded Clean Thaipusam in 2019 with 19 volunteers to collect the leftovers that were left along the streets following that year’s Thaipusam celebration.
Clean Thaipusam came about in 2019 when I gathered a few of my friends and family to help clean the Batu Caves area after the Thaipusam celebration.
“However, as people saw us picking up the leftovers, they also joined in and helped us clean up the area,” said Wicky in a Facebook video.
Since then, Sathiyavarmaan said the organisation has seen exponential growth in its volunteers from 19 in 2019 to a whopping 800 in 2020.
Clean Thaipusam, he said, encourages devotees to not throw away their fruit offerings after the prayers and, instead, pass them to the charity organisation to prevent wastage.
We noticed that people were throwing away so many fruits after the Kavadi and Paal Kudam (milk pot) rituals.
“The simplest and most intelligent thing to do is to share and eat the fruits. So, we decided to collect these fruits and feed them to the monkeys instead,” he said.
Compared to previous years, Sathiyavarmaan also said the organisation is going to scale down on volunteers this year due to the risk of Covid-19.
Instead of getting more volunteers to clean up the place, we have come up with the idea of placing 400 waste boxes around the areas instead.
“This way, the temple-goers can throw their leftovers into the boxes instead of the roadsides and this will reduce the amount of leftover pile-up,” said Sathiyavarmaan.
An estimated 1.5 million devotees are expected to come out for this year’s celebration, which inspired the initiative, he explained.
According to Sathiyavarmaan, tonnes of single-use plastic waste were scattered around the temple grounds, which soured the festival’s ambience in previous years.
Speaking to The Vibes, Sathiyavarmaan was happy to say that the Clean Thaipusam 2023 project has expanded to Thaipusam festivities in Penang, Ipoh, Batu Caves, and Sg Petani.
When asked about future plans especially involving Hindu temple festivities, he said despite Clean Thaipusam having expansion ideas, they would prefer to focus on the present initiative.
He also encouraged more people to join their team via Facebook to ensure a clean and enjoyable Thaipusam this year.
“We are a group of volunteers that want a clean and neat Thaipusam celebration, and we hope that we will be able to achieve that this year.” – The Vibes, February 4, 2023