A recipe instructs to boil a whole head of cabbage, can I boil individual leaves instead? In Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking, her recipe for Cabbage leaves stuffed with potatoes instructs you to boil the cabbage leaves by submerging the entire head of cabbage in a large pot of boiling water. 

This sounds like an accident waiting to happen to me, and I was wondering if this method affects the flavor, or will it be just the same to remove the leaves and boil individually.
The goal of the boiling step is to make it easy to remove the leaves. Removing whole individual cabbage leaves on a raw head of cabbage is tricky; they tend to tear.

If you want to put forth the effort, it should be just fine. They're cooked just long enough to soften them and make it possible to wrap them around the filling. I will happen much faster without a whole head of cabbage in there.