Our daughter, Baani, was born in April 2026. By July she would fall asleep one way only: in someone’s arms, bounced hard, up and down. Not rocked, not swayed. Bounced. For hours a day, and most put-downs woke her again.
We tried what the shops sell. A rocker, then two motorised swings, one that went side to side and one that went front to back. Neither put her to sleep. My wrists gave out. My wife and I stopped sleeping.
A ₹6,590 spring cot
Then we ordered a spring cot on Amazon: a cloth hammock hung from steel springs on a folding stand. I tapped the spring every four or five seconds, and Baani was asleep in five to ten minutes. Almost every time.
It gave us our evenings back. It was also bulky and ugly, and one of us still had to stand over it, tapping. We could never tell whether she was asleep without walking over to look. And when my wife tapped it, it did not work as well. Her rhythm was different from mine.
The bounce, it turns out, is personal.
Nothing in between
I went looking for something better. The swings and electric cradles in the shops move side to side. The one bed that bounced a baby up and down was a smart crib that cost ₹1,59,900. Nothing in between did the job properly, and nothing looked like it belonged in a home.
Bouncing a baby to sleep is not a new idea here. Indian homes have hung jhulas and spring cots for generations. पालना is simply Hindi for cradle. What was missing was a bed that did that bounce on its own, safely, and that a family would be glad to have in the living room.
So I started Palna, to build the thing we needed that July. It sits on the floor, so there is no height to fall from. It folds into a book and travels. It needs no app and no subscription. And it costs a fifth of that crib.
Keep the bounce. Lose the sling.
Before drawing anything, we read the safety rules and the research on babies, sleep and motion. The clearest lesson: in a baby hammock the danger is the sling, not the bounce. A baby should sleep flat, on something firm that stays level. So Palna keeps the up-and-down motion that worked for Baani and puts it under a flat, firm deck.
Your bounce, carried on
We took my wife’s problem seriously too. Palna does not ask you to learn its rhythm. Bounce the deck a few times with your hand and it picks up yours, then carries it on after your hands come away. And because the bed sets itself to your baby’s weight each time you put them down, the same setting feels the same at three kilos or at eight.
240 ways to build it
Then we worked through 240 ways to build it: hung from above, sprung from below, capsules, cradles, carry cases. We took the strongest ten all the way through engineering and had each one taken apart for safety, weight and stability. We kept one: a bed that closes like a book, opens flat on any floor and goes wherever you go.
That is Palna. It bounces your baby the way your arms do, lets you take your hands away, eases to stillness once they settle, and folds shut when you are done. The first ones go to homes in Bangalore in 2027. I want every family living those months to have one.
Harpreet