This ritual was declared banned due to its crazy procedure in 2011! Tossing your baby from the roof of a temple is considered an act of good luck to the child. How bizarre is that?! Believers of locality were so staunch in their belief that it was still carried out the following year.
When I think about India, what comes to mind is a lot of dancing and colours and spicy food. The rituals and customs in this country are full of life and are known to be very elaborate and sometimes even complicated. But have you heard about the insane ritual where babies preferably less than 2 years of age, are tossed from the top of a temple roughly about 30 ft. high?! It makes Michael Jackson’s incident, with his then baby son dangling from a balcony look quite normal don’t you think?In the state of Karnataka, the ritual of tossing a terrified baby into plain air has been in practice for the past 700 years! The procedure starts off with a climb to the top most part of a temple, where the priest then holds the crying babe in his hands, lifts it to the heavens and recites a few holy words. From there he hurls it into the air, where it takes 30 foot drop onto a mattress surrounded by handy men. At the first bounce, the baby is caught and given straight to its mother. After recovering from what just happened, the kid starts to cry in shock. Well, that’s just about what happens.
Unsurprisingly, there were quite a few outraged and shocked human rights activists that did not want this custom to see the light of day again. The ritual was declared banned in 2011, but this year it was carried out as usual by the staunch believers in the locality.
Having your baby go all Super Man for a few seconds is strongly believed to bring good luck and prosperity into the child’s life. Thinking of it in that way, why don’t we all take that drop of a sky scraper? Whoopee!! One odd fact about this tradition is that there is no known name for this act of horror in the local’s language. I guess calling it Baby Tossing just about fits it perfectly.