Baby drop ritual
Muslims in the Indian town of Solapur line up to drop their babies off a 15 meter tower, catching them in a white sheet. The ritual, which has taken place for more than half a millennium, is believed to make the children grow up healthy and strong. The faithful claim there have never been any injuries. Reuters has amazing video of the ritual.Link
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Michael Jackson would like to see this!
What a horrible idea. Who needs a sheet when you can use a catcher's mit?
I'd choose this over circumcision in a second if it were my child.
sweeeeeeeeeeeet. Is it only for babies?
Bwahahahahahahaha!
You can't make this stuff up, man.
Our religion can do better. Get the cannons!
Bunch of bloody nutters.
Wait! Maybe they're right!!
This happened to me several times as a child. Of course there were no white sheets waiting to catch me. I blame the oppressive Bush war machine for all my ills.
Better than the spartan version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta#Eugenics
@ #1 posted by Machinehead
XD
I blame Clinton.
Hmmm.... the Drudge report says it's 50 feet while Boing Boing says the baby is dropped only 49.2125985 feet. Are you trying to make the terrorists look better, Boing Boing?
This is barbarism. Don't these savages understand you have to wait until they are eighteen and then send them off with a gun and a lie to war in a strange land?
Not wonderful and more evidence that BoingBoing is becoming Fark.com.
Wht, n tny wn cndy xplsvs strppd t thm?
gss thy sv tht fr thr frst brthdy.
Baby Drop!
Dear Noen:
You need an aperitif, good selection for the main course and a chaser....why so glum?
The real question is how do they keep the sheet so white? You'd think that would scare the crap out of them!
One of my uncles is from a region in Mexico where you are supposed to spank your child on Sabbatum Sanctum so that they grow tall. He has the tallest children of my generation, but I doubt that had anything to do with it.
This video went right into the next video about defrosting a giant squid!
# 15, was that your attempt at a Muslim joke?
a chaser
I'm certain that you meant digestif.
both
Is it good luck to catch them on the first bounce?
The faithful claim there have never been any injuries.
The faithful also claim that God dictated a book thrgh th mth f chrsmtc lltrt trdr, nd tht prt f wht Gd wnts s t knw s tht blvrs wh fl t by th cmmnd t "strk ff thr hds" whn thy "mt th nblvrs n th bttlfld" nd nstd d fghtng wll g strght t Prds whr "shll flw rvrs f wtr ndfld, nd rvrs f mlk vr frsh; rvrs f wn dlctbl t ths tht drnk t, nd rvrs f clrfd hny" whl nblvrs wll sffr trnl trmnt. (47:1-16) Thy r f crs n gd (r shld tht b bd?) cmpny wth rgrd t ths knd f blf.
Th fthfl ls blv, "Mhmmd s Gd's pstl. Ths wh fllw hm r rthlss t nblvrs bt mrcfl t n nthr." (48:29) nd my bslt fvrt: "Mn hv thrty vr wmn bcs Gd hs md th n sprr t th thr, nd bcs thy spnd thr wlth t mntn thm. Gd wmn r bdnt. Thy grd thr nsn prts bcs Gd hs grdd thm. s fr ths frm whm y fr dsbdnc, dmnsh thm, frsk thm n bds prt, nd [chsts] thm." (4:34)
Whch cn nly b tppd by: "Y r ls frbddn t tk n mrrg tw sstrs t n nd th sm tm: ll prvs sch mrrgs xcptd. Srly Gd s frgvng nd mrcfl. ls, mrrd wmn, xcpt ths f whm y wn s slvs. Sch s th dcr f Gd. ll wmn thr thn ths r lwfl t y, prvdd y crt thm wth yr wlth n mdst cndct, nt n frnctn." t ds nt sy hw n crts fml slv wh s mrrd t smn ls "wth yr wlth n mdst cndct." Chrstns n th ld Sth wr svd frm ths dffclty by nt hvng th lgl blty t mrry th slvs thy rpd.
[ll qts frm th Pngn Clsscs trnsltn by N. J. Dwd, xcpt tht hv chngd th wrd "bt" t "chsts" whr ndctd, s th rbc wrd cntns smlr mbgty rgrdng th ntr f th pnshmnt.]
So given that they believe all or some of that, yeah, I have no problem with the idea that they believe no baby has ever been harmed by dropping them 15 metres into a blanket. Let's see: s = 0.5*g*t**2 => t ~ sqrt(3) ~ 1.7 s so v = 17 m/s or about 60 kph (40 mph).
What could possibly go wrong? If you have faith.
theres nothing like child abuse in the name of superstition.
Noen, dude, really, this is just an example that reality is often weirder than fiction. Who in their right mind would ever drop their baby like this? Probably me if my culture said it was okay. You have to admit it prompted a lot of funny stuff. My ivory tower has a basement too.
Jeff,
Please don't call Noen 'dude'.
Tom, can we not get into an "all people who believe in Religion X are crazy" dispute? There are plenty of equally sexist passages in the Old Testament, and some that come close in the New. There are stories in there about savage brutality being not only condoned but actually demanded by God (mountains of enemy foreskins, etc.). If someone waved those passages around and claimed that they were somehow instructive about what all Christians believe, or how they live their lives, you would probably point out that their statement lacked nuance and an appreciation for the diversity of Christian thought, belief and practice. I'd say your set of quotations does the same thing with respect to Islam.
@ #16 - And here I was feeling all guilty that my first thought after reading the headline was "Hey! That's a Shudder to Think song!" instead of "Oh noes! Think of the babies!"
Evidently, they're reuniting to play the Virgin Mobile Festival in Baltimore this summer. Thanks for the video link, and hooray for early 90s DC punk!
Oh, and, um, oh noes! Think of the babies!
Can't I be grouchy once in a while? Scheesh. For my aperitif, mansinthe just might fit the bill.
What came to mind was the old story about the bride who cuts both ends off of a roast before putting it in the roasting pan and then into the oven. Her new husband asks her why, and she says she doesn't know, it's just how her mom has always done it. So, the next time they go visit the parents, he asks the mom. She also says she doesn't know why, she does it because that's what HER mom always did. Holiday time comes, and the guy asks the grandma why she did it. Because her oven was so small, only a tiny roasting pan would work, so the roast had to be cut to fit.
I wonder if 100 years ago, a baby fell off this tower, and someone miraculously caught the baby in the laundry they were carrying home. A big hullabaloo was made, and a ceremony marking the occasion occurred at which the original event was recreated for everyone's edification/amusement.
And now, 100 years later, all local babies are thrown off the tower as a matter of course.
Why am I the only person who thinks this is totally awesome?
If someone waved those passages around and claimed that they were somehow instructive about what all Christians believe, or how they live their lives, you would probably point out that their statement lacked nuance and an appreciation for the diversity of Christian thought, belief and practice.
Actually, I wouldn't, and for the life of me I can't think why anyone would think otherwise. That's why I put in the nasty remarks about Christians as well, hoping that it would be clear that I was being critical of FAITH, rather than Islam in particular.
All people who believe in "Religion X" for all values of X are indeed nuts.
Faith is a form of insanity. Sometimes harmless, sometimes not.
Islam specifically is amongst the more harmful forms of faith in the world today, and that's saying something, given the run that Christians give them for the prize. Islam is more dangerous than Christianity right now in part because many Muslims have not yet started ignoring their holy book in the way Christians have been for the past couple of centuries. If there is hope for Islam it is from the Suffis, because failed mystics are famously good at reading whatever they want into the text.
Islam needs that badly, and there are many voices within the Islamic community today who are arguing for this. They don't do so in the same language I do, obviously, but they are actively trying to make Islam more humane because as it is practised today it frequently is anything but humane.
If you're unaware of the struggles for women's rights within Islam, then you are unaware of a great deal. Most formerly Christian nations have fortunately become sufficiently secular in the past few hundred years to broadly recognize that women have the same rights as men, however imperfectly those rights are protected. I know of no self-identified Islamic or formerly Islamic country where that is the case, although some are better than others--I'd far rather be a woman in Syria than Saudi Arabia, for example.
Turkey might count as a formerly Islamic country that has built a strong secular nation, but it has done it by exactly the same means as Christian nations did: rejecting or ignoring the literal word of God as it applies to the proper treatment of women.
There is concern about the growth of Christianity in public life in the United States for the same reason, and rightly so. Faith is toxic. If this happened to be a story about Christian's dropping their babies off 15 m heights I would have written an equally scathing response to it, and would have probably had someone point out that "Christians don't believe any of that stuff, really." But in fact some of them do, and even those few are enough to make the world a far less happy, far more dangerous place for all of us.
Even those who don't believe in any particular passage from the Bible or the Talmud or the Gitas, do believe that you can and should believe things without evidence, or even contrary to evidence. That is what faith is, and it seems to me that only a person operating on the basis of such a completely bankrupt epistemology could possibly claim that no baby has been harmed in centuries of dropping them from a great height.
You know what I love? How this article makes it seem as if this is a MUSLIM ritual when really it is 100% CULTURAL.
15 meters to a trampoline tight landing? On a baby's spine? Bad things sometimes happen, they are ignored, covered up and intimidated into silence.
It's a Stupid Thing. If someone did it with my child, I would kill them.
Is wearing a burqa or chadri is 100% cultural too, but that doesn't stop many Muslims from presenting it as a Muslim practice. Do you love that too?
Ok, I've been irritable about crazy people hurting their babies enough today.
Ummm...why did @25 get disemvoweled? Is quoting from nutty monotheists to make fun of them now verboten at Boing! Boing! unless the nutty monotheist is named Hagee?
it's no big deal it's just God's trampoline.
it's no big deal it's just God's trampoline.
Tom,
This post really has nothing to do with Islam. The fact that they're muslims is completely incidental to the story. People of all faiths around the world do all sorts of weird shit, much of it potentially injurious. You just took the opportunity to launch an anti-Islam rant.
This entry wasn't an invitation to go Muslim-bashing. Furthermore, the Muslims in question are a long way from the Middle East.
You know what happens when you refuse to recognize the reasonable people in a population that isn't in a position to ignore you? You eventually wind up being forced to deal with their hostile and unreasonable members instead. Therefore, you should always give recognition to the people who are doing what you wish everyone else in their population would do. In the case of most Muslims, that would involve recognizing that they aren't terrorists who'd be willing to see their children blown to shreds. Give them credit for it.
Cowicide, you read the Drudge Report? Eeeeeeuw.
Tom, every Quaker and U.U. that's got a Bible has a holy book with passages in it that are more than a match for the ones you've quoted. I own several Bibles, and at least one Koran. Does that mean you can explain everything I do in terms of their most objectionable passages?
GhostofLordBeaverbrook has a point. Is this worse than circumcision? It's certainly better than some of the stories coming out of that raid on the FLDS compound in Texas. Shall we check and see what percentage of the kids in Solapur show evidence of fractured bones?
Look at our overall infant mortality rate. We could be doing a lot better than we are now, and we know it, but we just don't do it. That doesn't leave us a lot of room to play holier-than-thou.
As for this business of dropping kids off a tower and catching them in a sheet: you're talking about a lot of people holding the sheet by its edges, under tension, and catching the kid in the middle. That's not the equivalent of a 40 mph collision. The sheet's taking up a lot of the shock. The kids are small and light enough to fall straight, and they still have relatively elastic bones. I'd wonder about diffuse axonal injury myself; but one shock of that apparent intensity will do less damage than repeated shaking or hitting. Also, it looks to me like the kids coming off that sheet are moving and breathing pretty normally.
Are there any reasons we might trust that community to be telling the truth about injuries? I can think of a few. One is that they're dropping boys as well as girls. Another is that if you botch a fifteen-meter baby drop, you're going to get the kind of injuries that can't be hidden or disguised. People would have noticed. Third, they may not be a religious minority in their immediate area, but they are in their country overall. There's a limit to how much they can get away with in the name of religion.
@#38 - Disemvoweled! I love it!
I'm wondering what kind of psychological impact, if any, this practice has on these kids.
"There's a limit to how much they can get away with in the name of religion."
you make me very, very angry.
http://www.acm.rpi.edu/~diesel/my_pics/halloween04_costume/marvin%20the%20martian.jpg
Antinous,
On reading the story I was first and foremost struck by how the belief that it is possible to drop babies off a 15 m tower and catch them in a sheet without any injuries happening for hundreds of years is just the perfect example of faith-based thinking. That was the point I was trying to make, and it seemed to me entirely reasonable to quote some of the crazier stuff in the Koran to say, "If they take this at all seriously, it is plausible that they have no problem believing babies can be dropped safely, and for the same reason." Unfortunately I did let my anti-Islamic feelings run away with me.
So your diagnosis that I "just took the opportunity to launch an anti-Islam rant" is off the mark. It was an attempt to launch an anti-faith rant using Islam as an example. The distinction is admittedly subtle, and in any case I clearly failed in my intent.
I can appreciate our BB overlords not wanting this thread to degenerate into a religious flame-fest, but that appreciation wanes when I look at the post just up the way, quoting Ben Stein saying far more hateful things about people like me than anything I have ever said about Muslims, Christians or any of the multiplicity of beliefs-without-evidence that have influenced so much of our world's history.
the belief that it is possible to drop babies off a 15 m tower and catch them in a sheet without any injuries happening for hundreds of years is just the perfect example of faith-based thinking.
Or, possibly, the result of having done so for hundreds of years. You have theory. They have practice.
#42 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden
I keep my friends close, but my enemies closer.
you throw a few thousand babies offa roof, sooner or later you're gonna break one. Who's gonna say "just" one?
Find a hospital administrator and borrow a few issues of Professional Liability Newsletter. Babies get dropped a lot. They bounce. And a sheet, even at that height, is safer than the floor.
what are "acceptable" odds? one in a thousand? ten thousand?
Sheet. Car.
Car. Sheet.
I'm just sayin'.
I too think this is totally awesome! (dugmartsch, you aren't the only one)
Seriously, I would love to have been tossed like this as a kid. The experiences you have during your first few years form the basis for your personality later in life. I remember how great it felt when my parents would toss me up and catch me in a blanket. Not from 40 feet, but still. I imagine such a thing would have felt great at that age.
Listen, everybody, look at it like this: Have you ever participated in trust exercises? The kind where you fall backwards into someone's arms? I have, and despite how silly it looks or feels at the time, it feels great, and has a profound psychological effect. That visceral memory of falling and then being caught is very powerful and very strengthening. You literally know there are people who will catch you if you fall. It's a physical expression of support and love.
Now, imagine taking that to such an extreme. I imagine those children do indeed grow up quite fearless and ready for anything. Not because of the fall, but because they were caught at the end by a community who loves them.
This is a tradition that's been going on for generations. That means every adult in that video was probably tossed off that same building and caught by their whole village. Do you think they'd keep doing it if it was a negative thing for them?
This is one of the most beautiful rituals I've ever seen. I suspect this is a very tight-knit community, where most everyone can trust and depend on each other. They all have an innate memory of being caught from falling by their whole village, as well as a memory of catching those who will come next.
So yeah, say what you will, but I think it's really really cool. And I wish we had a tradition like that here.
I call BS on the 50 foot/15 meter eight of the drop.
The formula for distance fallen on earth (in a vacuum) is Distance fallen = 16* (time elapsed)^2 or d=16*T^2. The kids fall for maybe a second max to a sheet that's, what, four feet from the ground?
Altogether that makes the drop point about 20' from the ground with an error of maybe 4 feet.
I've seen reports on this ritual in the Indian media recently. Strictly speaking there's nothing Islamic about the ritual - Hindu's also participate in it.
It's performed at a 'dargah' - the shrine of a sufi saint. Dargahs tend to attract people of all faiths and are frowned upon by orthodox Islam.
"Have you ever participated in trust exercises? The kind where you fall backwards into someone's arms?"
Yeah. They were looking the other way and dropped me.
Babies can't make choices. We don't ask them if they want to be vaccinated. It's one thing to leave a six year old child alone in the jungle to find his way home - at least they have a chance if not a choice. Babies are to be looked after, fed,protected and not subjected to stupid risks for adult jollies.
It's not necessary. It's stupid.
hmmmm. how many here who favour throwing babies out windows were indoctrinated from birth in the "concept" of "Original Sin"?
@#52 (Dagfooyo) - That is a beautiful way of looking at it. I would love to imagine that this ritual serves as a sort of trust exercise for these babies and that it is emotionally and socially beneficial for them.
However, the truth is that infants don't experience things in the same way that adults or even older children do. What is considered normal, bearable, or fun for older people can sometimes be traumatic for infants and can even hinder normal neurological development.
Now, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I'm wondering if the terrifying experience of falling 40 feet has a negative impact on the neurological development of these infants. I read an article in the New York Times which described the release of a massive surge of stress hormones in infants who underwent surgery without anesthesia and the possibly lifelong imprint this leaves on the developing nervous system.
"Infants, and perhaps fetuses, may do something different with pain: some research suggests they take it into their bodies, making it part of their fast-branching neural networks, part of their flesh and blood," the article said.
The article went on to discuss the observations of pain specialist Anna Taddio, who noticed that the male infants she treated seemed more sensitive to pain than the females - she hypothesized that this could be because of a painful event experienced by many boys: circumcision.
"In a study of 87 baby boys, Taddio found that those who had been circumcised soon after birth reacted more strongly and cried for longer than uncircumcised boys when they received a vaccination shot four to six months later. Among the circumcised boys, those who had received an analgesic cream at the time of the surgery cried less while getting the immunization than those circumcised without pain relief."
Taddio went on to suggest, "When we do something to a baby that is not an expected part of its normal development, especially at a very early stage, we may actually change the way the nervous system is wired."
(The article can be viewed here.)
So, I wonder: if early encounters with pain can make a baby hypersensitive to pain, then can early encounters with terror make a child hypersensitive to terror?
I found an interesting piece at The Childtrauma Academy (click here to read the piece) which discusses the altered neurological development of children who are exposed to trauma at an early age.
So says the article, "During these critical periods of primary neural system organization, the brain requires and is most sensitive to organizing experiences (and the neurotrophic cues related to these experiences). Disruptions of experience-dependent neurochemical signals during these periods may lead to major abnormalities or deficits in neurodevelopment -- some of which may not be reversible (see below). Disruption of critical cues can result from 1) lack of sensory experience during critical periods or 2) atypical or abnormal patterns of necessary cues due to extremes of experience."
The article goes on to say, "Early life experiences have disproportionate importance in organizing the mature brain. Experiences which could be tolerated by a 12 year old child can literally destroy an infant (e.g., being untouched for two weeks). Both lack of critical nurturing experience and excess exposure to traumatic violence will alter the developing CNS, predisposing to a more impulsive, reactive and violent individual."
Now, I suppose it's possible that I'm overreaching when I call the experience of falling 40 feet "terrifying" for a baby. Personally, I imagine it must be, but that's just me - I could be wrong! What do you guys think?
My cousin plays baby-toss with both his child and his small dog. It involves the parents standing across the room from each other, tossing the child or dog back and forth. They compete to see who can do it with more style, I think, and there's something to do with the number of spins they can get the kid to do.
The little girl absolutely loves it, laughs like crazy and becomes very interactive. The dog wets himself, curls in his tail, and becomes stiff and non-responsive (every muscle in him body is clinched as tight as can be). We love both reactions.
I'm not keen on daft religious practices, but this is rather sweet. I do wonder what would happen, however, if the baby was dropped with an accidental rotation, and landed either on his/her head, or on an outstretched arm? But then again - life is full of risk!
Next thing you know these crazy muslims will be making their kids take the subway home alone.
"The dog wets himself, curls in his tail, and becomes stiff and non-responsive (every muscle in him body is clinched as tight as can be). We love both reactions."??????!!!!!!!!
Agent 86: Logical, the dog day dogs throw their off-spring down a high place, all tailcurling will dissappear.
Theresa wrote,
"Tom, every Quaker and U.U. that's got a Bible has a holy book with passages in it that are more than a match for the ones you've quoted. I own several Bibles, and at least one Koran. Does that mean you can explain everything I do in terms of their most objectionable passages?"
That is an extremely disingenuous response as Tom's ire was clearly aimed at people who have "faith" in the stories in those books as the revealed word of a monotheistic god.
That is an extremely disingenuous response as Tom's ire was clearly aimed at people who have "faith" in the stories in those books as the revealed word of a monotheistic god.
Except that those people pick and choose what's convenient just like everyone else.
If given the option, I wonder how many adults who were dropped like this as babies would be into trying BASE jumping? And is being terrified by falling off a building an innate response? The babies might just be perceiving a slight breeze and see scenery moving by a bit quicker than usual.
Seriously though, this ritual doesn't seem to confer enough benefit to anyone to be justified. Every single injury (no matter how slight) that has happened due to this ritual was unnecessary, and rest assured there have been. Murphy's Law is international, as is covering our asses by denying our occasional, um... shall we say 'mishaps?'
The video is funny though. I liked how it was edited so as to not show the sheet until the first baby reaches it, probably to create a more shocking first impression. It also explains where the term "bouncing baby boy" (or girl) came from.
I read somewhere a few years ago and I can't recall where, that human infants have an innate fear of heights at birth. They may not innately fear a burning fire and have to learn that fear but that death by falling was "pre-programmed" in the brain.
I am not a psychiatrist either but I would guess that the ritual may have a significant impact on the character of the infant. I suspect that it would make a person better at dissociating experiences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)
I'll second desiredusername, as long as he's saying it's kick ass to help teach children how to dissociate.
#37 Tom
"Is wearing a burqa or chadri is 100% cultural too, but that doesn't stop many Muslims from presenting it as a Muslim practice. Do you love that too?
Ok, I've been irritable about crazy people hurting their babies enough today."
I know this is a bit late but I don't think that you actually got my point. I am so sick of people explaining their cultural practices as religious ones. Baby tossing: Not Islamic. Wearing the burqa: Not Islamic.
The only thing i'm trying to say here is that people should do their research before they start explaining things as religious beliefs. They are demeaning the religion itself by misrepresenting it and are making themselves seem superbly ignorant.
it certainly seems a good process for eliminating the heavy headed tots. if i really had to choose between this and circumcision i'd pick this. it looks more of a fuji mermaid then a baby from the picture.
I suspect that it would make a person better at dissociating experiences.
Oddly, I learned to dissociate when I threw my parents off a building.
Forget throwing babies off a tower. How about throwing adults off the tower? Those wimpy trust exercises where you fall backward at ground level needs a slight modification. If you truly trust your mates, you'll jump off the tower and they will catch you in a little blanket 20m below.
An additional advantage is that this will create really tight teams. Those who don't trust their team mates will chicken out. Those disliked by their team mates will go splat, and thereby be culled.