A Really Strange Festival- Bhunda Narmedh Mahayajna

I came across this video via Indiamike. I was looking at some information about festivals in India and that is where this thread cropped up. If you follow the video links from Indiamike, there is a part 1 of this video too. It has so much (for me) animal slaughter on camera! Ihave to admit, I closed my eyes and peered between the fingers to see if we are on to something else. And I am not embedding it too.

Here is a description of the festival taken from the Tribune newspaper.

In the freezing heights of Bachoonch village in the prosperous apple belt of the Spail valley, Bhunda mahayajna stole the thunder on Christmas. More than 70,000 people thronged the village, 9 km from Rohru town, to watch this death-defying rope trick held there to please the local deities after a gap of 70 years. For locals, the Bhunda practice is nothing unusual in fact, for them it is as old as the hills. But for strangers, the rope trick was a crazy ritual that could have plunged Kunwar Singh, a traditional ‘Beda’ man, into the jaws of death had he fallen from the rope into the deep nullah.

But he did not. Kunwar performed the rope trick for the eighth time. Interestingly, if Kunwar, who belongs to Lohar caste (family of silversmiths) performs the rope trick 19 times, his family will become twice born — Dvij, the Brahmins. Bhunda narmedh (human sacrifice) mahayajna went almost unnoticed all these years.