Pongal Harvest Festival may be included in tourism calendar

KUCH­ING: Min­is­ter of Tourism, Arts and Cul­ture Datuk Karim Rah­man Hamzah hopes to put Pon­gal on Sarawak’s tourism cal­en­dar.

He says the harvest fes­ti­val of the Hin­dus has the po­ten­tial to be held on a larger scale and in this re­spect, his min­istry will do what it can to help it be in­cluded in the tourism cal­en­dar.

“It is a beau­ti­ful cel­e­bra­tion – a colour­ful cel­e­bra­tion. Look at the ‘ ko­lam’ (floor art­work tra­di­tion­ally made us­ing coloured rice flour or rice grains); how beau­ti­ful and colour­ful it is.

“We will see how we can get it (Pong­gal) be held on a big­ger scale, and the min­istry can be part of the fes­ti­val,” he spoke dur­ing the fes­ti­val held at Kuch­ing Water­front yes­ter­day.

Adding on, Ab­dul Karim ac­knowl­edged Sarawak as hav­ing a di­verse pop­u­la­tion and in this sense, he said the gov­ern­ment strove to en­sure that no com­mu­nity would feel like they were be­ing side­lined, ‘by cel­e­brat­ing every­thing to­gether’.

“This is the unique­ness of Sarawak and we do hope those liv­ing in Penin­su­lar Malaysia could see how we han­dle this in Sarawak.

“De­spite our small pop­u­la­tion of 2.8 million, we have so many dif­fer­ent re­li­gions and eth­nic groups, but we are able to un­der­stand and be tol­er­ant of ev­ery­one and re­spect one an­other.”

Ab­dul Karim re­garded the Pon­gal cel­e­bra­tion as sim­i­lar to the harvest fes­ti­vals cel­e­brated by many com­mu­ni­ties, such as the Dayaks here.

In this re­gard, he re­called how the cel­e­bra­tion was made an is­sue in Penin­su­lar Malaysia – made worse by the strained re­la­tions that were af­fect­ing many com­mu­ni­ties there.

Thus, he pointed out that the Sarawak gov­ern­ment had formed the Unit for Other Re­li­gions (Uni­for) to look af­ter and as­sist those em­brac­ing re­li­gions other than Is­lam. NEWS SOURCE: The Borneo Post (03.02.2020)