{"id":4839,"date":"2008-04-28T00:45:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-27T19:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.indiauncut.com\/?p=2661"},"modified":"2008-04-28T00:45:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-27T19:15:00","slug":"secular-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indiauncut.com\/secular-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Secular Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"
This is surely the WTF headline of the year so far:<\/p>\n
Incredible India! Infants thrown off roofs to thank God<\/a><\/p>\n Here’s the video<\/a>. Watch it, it’s astonishing.<\/p>\n And here’s the WTF quote of the piece<\/a>, from “deputy sarpanch of Musti village, Ravikiran Mehta”:<\/p>\n People have been following this tradition for almost 500 years now. They believe that if they throw the child from the roof then it does good to him or her.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I have a theory for how this tradition came to exist. Centuries ago, some village patriarch went mad and started throwing kids off the roof. The kids got brain-damaged in the process, and continued the tradition when they became parents, causing the next generation to also become brain-damaged. And so on. What else can explain such lunacy?<\/p>\n But wait, there’s more. The last (terribly ungrammatical) sentence of the report says:<\/p>\n Both Muslim and Hindu families take part in this ritual, however the state administration chooses not to interfere and provides heavy police security during the ritual every year.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Yes, the cops don’t protect the kids—they protect the idiots throwing them off a roof. If I pinch myself any more the mosquitoes will go on strike.<\/p>\n (Link via separate emails from vinjk<\/a> and Mahendra Shikaripur<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Update<\/b>: I’d embedded the video on this page, but it kept making a pop-up ad open when this page was refreshed. I hate pop-ups, and would hardly want to inflict such inconvenience on my readers, so I’ve changed that to a link.<\/p>\n Update 2<\/b>: Krishna Prasad writes in pointing me to his post<\/a> last year about a similar ritual in North Karnataka. Ah, tradition!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is surely the WTF headline of the year so far:<\/p>\n Incredible India! Infants thrown off roofs to thank God<\/a><\/p>\n Here’s the video<\/a>. Watch it, it’s astonishing.<\/p>\n And here’s the WTF quote of the piece<\/a>, from “deputy sarpanch of Musti village, Ravikiran Mehta”:<\/p>\n People have been following this tradition for almost 500 years now. They believe that if they throw the child from the roof then it does good to him or her.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I have a theory for how this tradition came to exist. Centuries ago, some village patriarch went mad and started throwing kids off the roof. The kids got brain-damaged in the process, and continued the tradition when they became parents, causing the next generation to also become brain-damaged. And so on. What else can explain such lunacy?<\/p>\n But wait, there’s more. The last (terribly ungrammatical) sentence of the report says:<\/p>\n Both Muslim and Hindu families take part in this ritual, however the state administration chooses not to interfere and provides heavy police security during the ritual every year.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Yes, the cops don’t protect the kids—they protect the idiots throwing them off a roof. If I pinch myself any more the mosquitoes will go on strike.<\/p>\n (Link via separate emails from vinjk<\/a> and Mahendra Shikaripur<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Update<\/b>: I’d embedded the video on this page, but it kept making a pop-up ad open when this page was refreshed. I hate pop-ups, and would hardly want to inflict such inconvenience on my readers, so I’ve changed that to a link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15,17],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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