By Yashaswi Bairagi
Ketan Agarwal’s murder made it clear that arranged marriages have outlived their usefulness. For generations, society has put pressure on young adults to fall in line and accept arranged marriages, testing them like pawns in a family transaction, but when we give in to parental pressure, we are playing with fire. If the arranged match goes south, parents might face temporary gossip, but they quickly wash their hands of the message. It is the couple who is left to bear the brunt of toxic and loveless reality and pick up the pieces.
This is the reason youth must stand on their ground, and choose love, even if it means you have to burn bridges with your family and the world. Ketan’s case is not the first instance where all of this is taking place, last 1 decade is littered with examples where either 1 or both the partners tied the knot under duress, either by family or something else and later on that turned out to be disaster not only for the couple for the all the people connected with them. When we have the responsibility of our own life, we ensure that we are marrying a true partner, not a stranger, whose past and present feelings might remain hidden and we never know the true intentions. There are chances that even after our loved one can bring bad experiences and unwanted outcomes, it’s still 100 per cent better than living the most of your life when you don’t know much or can’t know much. Do not let others dictate your future, it is you who will ultimately pay the price.
The fundamental flaw in arranged marriages is the stark lack of accountability, when families broker the marriage, they usually look at superficial metrics – wealth, status, and caste, and we say God decides the pair in heaven. Families size up candidates like commodities and when things start to go awry, parents are rarely the one to face the music. Relatives brush it off and continue with their comfortable lives, while the couple is thrown to the wolves. Every waking hour they bear the brunt of living with a stranger they never fully or truly chose. The couple or the victim is told to swep their misery under the rug just to keep the family’s reputation intact.
Choosing love marriage means you are refusing to be a sacrificial lamb for your family’s social standing. Yes, deciding to stand up to your parents can be incredibly daunting. It may mean that you are forced to start from zero even without any family backing. This could mean turning back on the very people who raised us but consider the alternative, living a lifelong lie just to keep the peace and only to completely break down behind closed doors.
All in all, your life is yours to live. Instead of asking people to find love despite saying millions of positive things about love, we horribly ask to adjust with family choices and face blackmailing of severing ties or doing something bad. Most of the people go to school, coaching and college as per the choice of parents, and then are asked to do so for the rest of their lives as well, and everyone repeats the cycle. This needs to be broken now. Taking control of our life and fighting for a love marriage is always with the price. Had Siya got the environment from family where she could tell them whom she loves, no one would be needing to go to prison, die and suffer pain.
(The writer is an Assistant Professor, Commerce Department, Advance College, Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh)
