Thiruvananthapuram:
Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi on Tuesday night offered prayers at the famous Attukal Devi Bhagavati temple here.
After addressing a series of public meetings in Alappuzha, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts, she visited the shrine, along with Veena S Nair, Vatiyoorkavu candidate of the UDF and spent sometime at the shrine.
A large number of people were at the temple during Priyanka’s visit.
She laterleft for a public meetingin a coastal hamlet at Valiyathura.
On Pongala day, women converge in the grounds and both sides of the highways, roads and bylines across the city, unmindful of the scorching midsummer heat.
They prepare ‘pongala’, a mix of rice, jaggery and scraped coconut in fresh earthen or metal pots in makeshift brick stoves to please the Goddess.
However, this time the temple authorities decided to scale down the festival rituals by confining the pongala ritual to temple premises and the devotees were asked to offer the ritual at their homes to avoid crowding.
This was the first time in history thefestival was held as a mere ritual.
