"PONGAL" FESTIVAL of TAMIL NADU

Pongal is one of the most important festival celabrated accross Tamil Nadu.The harvest festival of Tamil Nadu marks the withdrawal of the southeast monsoons and happy days of reaping of the harvest. Basically a rural festival, it is celebrated in the month of Thai (that falls in January) for four days.The month of Pongal is considered very auspicious for marriages and other kinds of activities. During the festival, Sun God is worshipped as a sustainer of life on Earth.It is the New Year festival of the State and hence is associated with cleaning and burning of the rubbish from the past. 'Kolams' (Rangoli) drawn with rice flour to feed the insects in the front yards of the houses, new clothes, adorning cattles with beads, bells and flowers and painting and capping their horns with metals, delicious traditional cuisines,typical style of worshipping rituals and a procession taken out from the Kandaswamy Temple in Chennai along with the bull fights or Jellikattu in Madurai, Tanjore and Tiruchirrapalli and community meals are the chief highlights of Pongal.