An AP report from New Delhi:
Ajit Singh knows about the lies people tell.
He has followed them through the littered, mildewed mazes of New Delhi’s middle class neighborhoods. He has photographed them as they leave their lovers’ apartments. He hears them exaggerate their salaries and hide their illnesses.
A thin man in an ill-fitting suit, Singh works out of a crowded office around the corner from a muffler shop. An incense stick burns behind his desk. A sign in slightly fractured English warns the staff: ”Walls Has Ears And Eyes Too. BE ALERT.”
Singh has spent years honing his skills: disguise, surveillance, misdirection. With just a few minutes’ notice, he can deploy teams nearly anywhere across the country.
Because in modern India, where centuries of arranged marriages are being replaced by unions based on love, emotion and anonymous Internet introductions, where would a wedding be without a private detective? More:
Craze — and demand — for gold in dowry has sent bullion prices soaring, turning marriage into a very hard bargain for women. From Tehelka:
In Kerala, marriage is worth its weight in gold. On January 20 this year, though, a bridegroom-to-be’s happy hopes of a windfall met with a rude shock. In a small village near Kollam, 26-year-old Sreekala walked away from the marriage venue, and later filed a case, when the groom’s family insisted that the entire dowry including 100 sovereigns of gold be paid before the knot was tied. Despite several social reform movements and decades of “revolutionary” Left rule, Kerala remains plagued by dowry.
It’s amidst this widespread sense of humiliation among the state’s women that the Class X-educated Sreekala has quickly grown to be an icon of self-respect. Though the groom’s family later adopted a more conciliatory stance, Sreekala refused to withdraw her complaint under the Dowry Prohibition Act. A week later, on January 27, her cousin Ramesh married her in a ceremony that saw hundreds of cheering attendees from across the district.
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Kirk Semple in the New York Times
Kabul — On the afternoon before his wedding day this fall, Hamid was sitting in an empty teahouse worrying a glass of green tea between his fingers, his brow furrowed in concern.
He confessed to feeling a certain anxiety at seeing his bachelor’s independence slipping away. But something else was troubling him, as well: the cost of his wedding.
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.
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