The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India by Mansi Choksi

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India by Mansi Choksi A literary investigation into India as a society in transition through the lens of forbidden love, as three young couples reject arranged marriages and risk everything for true love in the midst of social and political upheaval. In India, two out of every three people are under the age of thirty-five. These are men and women who grew up with the internet and the advent of smartphones and social media. But when it comes to love and marriage, they’re expected to adhere to thousands of years of tradition. It’s that conflict between obeying tradition and embracing modernity that drives journalist Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds. Through vivid, lyrical prose, Choksi shines a light on three young couples who buck against arranged marriages in the pursuit of true love, illustrating the challenges, shame, anger, triumph, and loss their actions and choices set in play. Against the backdrop of India’s beautiful villages and cities, Choksi introduces our newlyweds. First, there’s the lesbian couple forced to flee for a chance at a life together. Then there’s the Hindu woman and Muslim man who escaped their families under the cover of night after being harassed by a violent militia group. Finally, there’s the inter-caste couple who are doing everything to avoid the same fate as a similar couple who were burned alive. Engaging and moving, The Newlyweds raises universal questions, such as: What are we really willing to risk for love? If we’re lucky enough to find it, does it change us? If so, for the better? Or for the worse?

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks just boss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com welcome to the show folks we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here once again hey the chris voss show the family that loves you but doesn't

judge you. The best kind of family there is. You can get it on shirts coming this winter. I don't know. We're not doing shirts this winter. I don't know what the hell we're doing this winter. We're going to stay warm, and you can stay warm, too, by referring the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Chris Voss, I don't know, any of the

Chris Voss Show channels, go to youtube.com for it says Chris Voss. Goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss. LinkedIn, the big LinkedIn group, Chris Voss, I don't know, any of the Chris Voss Show channels, go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn, the big LinkedIn group, chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com, and all that good stuff. Stay tuned. We've got some amazing CEO interviews on leadership, too, coming up as well. Today, we have another amazing author on the show. She's got a new book that's coming out August 30th, 2022. You can pick it up and pre-order it for your book club.

Be the first one to read it. And I find it most interesting because I've always been interested in their culture, their caste society, and everything else. I'm always interested in learning new things. So that's why I have the show, so I can learn some stuff. This is how I learn people. I skipped college. So she's the author of the new book, The Newlyweds, Rearranging Marriage in Modern India. It comes out August 30th or 30, 2022. Manzi Choksi is on the show with us today. She's going to be talking to us about her amazing book, what went into it, all the research she did. And you're probably going to learn some interesting things about stuff and how the world is changing. It's changing everywhere around the world,

modernism and traditionalism and everything else. She is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and two-time Livingston Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, and more. She lives in Dubai with her husband and son. The Newlyweds is her first book. Welcome to the show and congratulations on your first book. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

There you go. And give us your dot coms or wherever you have on the interwebs you want people to find you. Yeah. So my website is MansiChoksi.com. That's M-A-N-S-I-C-H-O-K-S-I.com. Twitter is manchi underscore choksi. Instagram is manchi underscore choksi. LinkedIn is manchi choksi. And Facebook is manchi choksi. There you go. So what motivated you on to write this as your first book? Yeah. So I grew up in India. I grew up in Mumbai. And one of the things that I constantly thought about is how so many young people don't how the society does not implode from so many

young people pushing against what we want, and what we can have. India has one of the world's largest young populations, yet we have, you know, we're expected to adhere to centuries old traditions, especially with love and marriage. You know, love is essentially taboo. And marriage is seen as a sort of arrangement between two families that belong to the same, you know, in the same sort of like hierarchy of caste, class, region, language. You know, marriage is just seen as an extension of two families, essentially. So there's a lot of pressure placed on who you can choose to marry. And I wanted to really tell the story about what was happening in India right now through the vehicle of the love story. So I wanted to discuss serious forces that are changing modern India.

For example, how, you know, the sort of relevance of millennial caste prejudice in society today, you know, our colonial history with homophobic legislation, and you know, how ancient Indian society like does not have a base, like did not have a culture of, you know, like, ostracizing LGBT or same sex love. And thirdly, about a Hindu and Muslim couple that finds itself at the center of a political controversy known as love jihad. And I wanted to use that story to highlight a larger sort of theme about, you know, India's launch to the right. So I wanted to use the vehicle of the love story to discuss the big issues that we're facing in India at the moment,

and especially for what's at stake for young people. And India has a lot of different, I believe, languages or sub-languages, don't they? Yeah, thousands, millions. Wow. And then cultures. Yes, absolutely. Here in America, we just use the F word everywhere. That's pretty much our language.

Colonialism brought some of that. You've got that. Yeah, we've got that too. Yeah, we export Americanism to everybody and ruin their country. So yeah, this is kind of interesting. You know, I didn't know about the caste system in India until I read, I think, Israel Wilkerson's book on caste, which is incredible. And I learned so much about it. And it was, you know, I mean, to me me it seems very crazy but you know i i grew up in the age where i think in england you know up until margaret thatcher you know they had the

they had their system too and it's really it's really curious and and i haven't thought about that because you know i've seen romeo and juliet the play you know i know when two you know you can't you can't hold back love is there a song or something that I'm thinking of, you know, when people love each other, you know. Hi, Voxers, Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements,

if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. And it's kind of interesting you you mentioned early on that you know love isn't something that you know i guess in the traditionalism india really isn't

a thing then huh yeah no i mean there has always been a history of love in india but society has always sort of thwarted it so even our greatest love stories for instance bollywood which is you know essentially like a largest like it I would say it's like our national narrative in a sense because it's just so popular and widespread other than 80 percent are romantic films so yeah I mean love and the you know the concept of love is and you know these forbidden love stories especially are pervasive across India and but the truth is that in real life, the stakes are really high for people who choose to love outside of tradition.

And those stakes can look really dangerous. So one of the couples in the book, their names are Neetu and Davinder. They belong to different castes and they're from the same village. And according to rural customs, men and women of the same village are considered brothers and sisters.

So it's a form of incest in their mind. they also belong to different so when they run away their main worry is being targeted for honor killing by their community they're worried that they will yeah they will be kidnapped and they will be they will be killed and and that's and that's not a and that's not a paranoia or like something completely far-fetched because um you know there are instances that we hear of constantly where couples that run away or elope together for love outside of these boundaries of caste and religion do often find themselves in the middle of these horrific murder cases.

Not far from where Neetu and Devinder grew up, there was another couple who's also mentioned in the book named Manoj and Bab, who sought police protection, got all the court's help to give them the protection to go to a safe place. And eventually, they were kidnapped by the girl's family. Manoj was sort of strangled to death and Bubbly was forced to drink insecticide

and their bodies were just found wrapped in gunny sacks in some village canal. So there are really serious stakes here yeah that's like a whole that's a worse story than romeo and juliet yeah yeah yeah you got somebody else making drink the poison the speaking i'm not gonna do that joke this is really interesting you know it's interesting to me that honor killings are still going on, I guess. Yeah. Is that legal in India? How does that work?

No. So that's the thing. So honor killings for the longest time, there was no separate law to deal with honor killings. They were clubbed with murders. And, you know, unlike, say, the dowry law, which has tradition at the root of that law. So there's a there's a law for anti-dowry practice so dowry is is the wealth that the family the bride's family is traditionally expected to hand over to the man who will marry her and it's a form of a bigger

source of domestic abuse because the groom's family can keep on harassing the bride and you know essentially blackmailing her family for more and more money. So there was a special law that was, you know, I'm not sure in which year, but there was a special law that came into effect that did a really good job at tackling that issue. But with honor crimes, for instance, that has not been the case so far because they have always been clubbed with murder. And often we find that, you know, policemen that are investigating honor crimes are also on the side of families or empathize with families that perpetrate these crimes. So that's another problem. So currently there's a law in the parliament up for discussion to kind of start a separate law for honor killing. And hopefully that will pass soon and, you know, things will look better. Yeah, that would be ideal.

I mean, I mean, if somebody runs off with my daughter, I'm just like, just as long as you pay for all the stuff she keeps buying on Amazon. I'm just kidding. I don't have a daughter, but if I did, that would probably be the joke I'd use. You know, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be wanting to kill you. I'd be like, thanks for taking over the payments. The that's really, that's really strange. You know, I grew up in religion where, you know, it's very cultish, especially the religion I grew up in. And you know, they're, you know, you have to get married in the temple and all this kind of silliness and stuff. But this is like a whole new level. And, you know, I heard about a lot of this growing up. And you would think in 2022 that we're more modern than we are.

But I don't know if you've seen the place lately where we're still stuck in a lot of old world stuff. So you tell the stories and I imagine you tell the stories of one couple that are, I believe, are gay or a lesbian couple. Yes, yes. And of course, you know, more and more that's become accepted. People can come out that are gay. They don't have to hide anymore. And so, yeah, I can imagine in countries that are still struggling with embracing this. That's is LGBTQ gay marriage. is that legal in your country at all?

Yeah. So, no, it's not legal, but it's also decriminalized lately. with the help of the British colonizers, came an act called Section 377, which essentially outlawed homosexual behavior, but also clubbed homosexual behavior with, you know, pedophilia and, you know, other horrible things. And yeah, and then, you know, there's been a there's been a long, long timeline of activism around this law, because as you know, as the country, you know, liberalized opened up a lot of the other laws that were regressive and, you know, kind of like had no space in modern India were updated, changed, struck down. But yeah, in 2010, there was a law that was passed that decriminalized homosexual behavior. But then there was, you know, there was a series of other litigations that, you know, kind of like penalized that behavior again.

And late, just in 2018, finally, a law was passed to decriminalize homosexuality in India. But that doesn't mean that homosexual people, LGBT people, are given equal rights. Absolutely not. It just means that it's no longer a criminal act. So there's a long, long fight and a long way to go before there can be equal rights for everybody and every citizen of India.

It's an interesting journey. One thing I found that was interesting in your book is in India, two out of three people are under the age of 35. So you have a kind of a dwindling, you know, dying off older class like we do. And you have this, you have a massive group of people that want to modernize the world. So there's probably a lot of battle between the old and new worlds. Absolutely. But also it's a very, this particular generation is really unique because this is the first generation that's had access to mobile phones, to, you know, to like all forms of media. And, you know, it's kind of opened up our

worlds in in a way that has never happened before in India you know our lives were kind of limited to your home your street your city at the most but now suddenly we're you know we're able to see what teenagers in South Korea or in the United States are doing and and on one hand there is this like pull of like modernity but then there's also this very deep push. I mean, sorry, push of modernity, pull either way. The push of tradition, like we are really deep rooted. We have really internalized, you know, like the concept of filial duty is really huge in Indian society. Like, you know, kind of you want to do well by your parents' expectations.

And if you don't, you know, there is a huge to do well by your parents expectations. And if you don't, you know, there is a huge personal sort of like feeling of failure if you if you don't sort of like don't have that duty bound feeling. Yeah, so recently, actually, a poll was conducted where they did a bunch of, you know, like, they surveyed a bunch of a bunch of young people in India and asked them about their attitudes towards love and marriage. And it was astounding because most most young people actually said that, yeah, we actually believe in like, marrying in the same caste, we actually believe in, you know, choosing a partner from our own religion, you know, that love marriage is not arranged marriage is better than love marriage. So you know, on one hand, you might think that this young people want something else. But it's also that it's also

true that a lot of young people want to live their lives exactly as their parents lived it. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot of, I don't know, it's really interesting to me what's going on in India, because, you know, we have a dwindling population and we're on decline. So is, and you look at what's gone on in Japan. They're in decline, and they have some real gentrification problems. China does as well. And for a long time, it was widely accepted that China would become the new rise of the dominant economic force and marketplace in the future because of their population. But it looks like almost India probably has a better shot at it because of the younger generation that's there. And, of course, I'm sure the modernization that they're going to eventually do,

hopefully they don't fall camp to the same things we did. I mean, when we destroyed the family, we pretty much destroyed everything. And that's what we're finding out now through a whole lifetime of generations, that destroying the family and destroying fathers was was was was the thing that would take apart everything now we're just in utter collapse really when you look at how we're built so it'll be interesting to see how you guys go down that path and and having having you know we have a much smaller generation to support the older generation in fact one of the problems we're having in our society right now is, you know, we were warned for so many years that when the baby boomers retired, our much smaller generations that followed would not be able to support their social security and the power of that.

And now we're really struggling because so many of the people from even my generation, Gen X, and boomers with COVID just went, hey, screw it, man, we're out. We're out of the workforce. We're just going to retire early. We're out. And now we're really finding out how much we're missing those workers and how much it's affecting our economy, inflation, and it's creative mayhem and bedlam over here. So you guys have really, I think you're one of the few countries

that have a future with, you know, really young populace and mass that's bigger than the older populace. So it'll be interesting to see how these things play out with marriage and traditionalism and, and et cetera, et cetera. And hopefully they'll make the same mistakes we did. Yeah. But there's a huge challenge as well about that because we have this massive, you know, it's like, it's any economy's dream, right? To have this massive labor force ready to be employed. But we're also not able to produce jobs at that scale because India kind of jumped from a manufacturing economy to, I mean, an agrarian economy to a service economy, essentially missing the manufacturing part. And we just do not have the jobs that can sustain this, you know, kind of huge labor force or like meaningfully employ them. So one of the problems we're dealing with at the moment is one of the highest rates of educated

unemployment. So we have hordes of highly educated young Indians that are graduating, trying to enter the workforce, but are not able to find jobs that can, that are meaningful to them or can, you know, fulfill their aspirations. So then they will take a gap here, try to like enter the part-time economy or do some temp work. But yeah, so it's not really... We're at the stage at the moment where we have a lot of frustrated aspirations

of these young people, especially... And I think that's part of why often we'll hear about, like in one of the states, a train will be set to fire in an active demonstration against just the pathetic levels of unemployment. Recently, there was an ad posted for a railway's job. I think

there were a few hundred jobs that were advertised. And the millions of young Indians applied for those jobs. And they were very, you know, very basic level jobs that did not require, I think, a 10th grade exam certification. But, you know, engineers and doctors and highly qualified professionals apply for these jobs because they don't have jobs or places to, you know, fulfill their dreams. Yeah. Is entrepreneurism a big thing there or is it? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There's like a bigger sort of surge in entrepreneurial startups and, you know, like, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There needs to be like a Silicon Valley over there sort of type of thing. I think there's some form of that coming up in the South. Of course, you know, not at the same scale. I mean, the CEO of Google right now, I mean, he grew up on a dirt floor in India. Right. Exactly. But, you know, you've got to have some mechanisms in society, government, rules, regulations, and, you know, people that can loan money. And, you know, there's a whole lot of support that comes from the VC.

Yeah, system in place. Yeah, exactly. But it'll be interesting. I mean, when you have that many people and they're that industrious to try and and you know they have that industrialism of youth yeah yeah yeah you know i think there's a good chance of finding it and of course you know over here we just have a bunch of lazy kids who grew up with silver spoons in their mouth and a phone in their hand and they just think everything comes through youtube or something i don't know or tikt. So, you know. Of course we do. Do you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Weak men, weak men. Strong men create easy times and easy times create weak men. I see. I've read that somewhere, yeah. Yeah, we seem to be in a circle of weak men. And now we have to go into hard times to find a strong man again. So this is really interesting. I mean, the caste system that's over there,

I mean, the combination of languages, so it's hard to escape and move to another state or area in India, I suppose, if you have language barrier issues. Yes, but in most places, Hindi and English are widely spoken. So you can move around, especially in the big cities, yeah, no problem. But of course, in smaller, in the countryside, yeah, that might be an issue. Yeah, they have to worry about people hunting you down.

Holy crap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if someone stole my kids, I'd be like, have fun with that. They're expensive. Go ahead. Keep them. Like, yeah, just be nice to them and you can keep them and, you know, all that good stuff take them

off my hands i i'd like three i'd be like if you change their diapers you can have them just go ahead just get them out of my hair they're crying a lot i'm just being mean i don't have kids for the obvious reasons i don't do diapers and i don't like crying. I have enough of that with the people in my life. It's social media. Yeah. I seem to have quite the following of social media, people crying. Anyway, anything more you want to touch on the book before we go out? Yeah. My hope is that the people who read this book come away thinking about, you know, what they've had to put at stake for love love and how love can take you know various forms in our life um in in in these stories that i write about you know it really dwells in the afterlife of what happens when you attain love so you know you kind of watch these couples live with their

grand love being diminished into the ordinariness of daily life so i just hope people you know kind of think that you know love can have various meanings. It can mean joy, thrill, also regret, and also like confusion and sadness. And I just, I just hope that it makes them think about their own lives and, you know, make them see the bigger picture. Yeah. And, you know, I, you know, it's, it's crazy what people do for love. Every great love song is about love. I mean, the heart just cannot be bridled, I guess, when it comes down to it. Yeah.

So there you go. Well, it's been wonderful having you on the show. Thank you for coming on and sharing your wonderful book with us. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. There you go. Thank you so much. Order it up, folks.

Wherever fine books are sold, go pre-order the book now. The Newlyweds, Rearranging Marriage in Modern India. Maybe I'll move to India and find a nice young lass. Do they still call them a lass? Am I just old? I don't know. Probably. I use that as a joke, folks.

So thanks for coming on the show. Give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs. Yes. It's mansi.choksi.com is my website. You'll also see some of my work. You'll get links to the pre-order. My Twitter It's mancitroxie.com is my website. You'll also see some of my work. You'll get links to the pre-order. My Twitter is

mancitroxie. Instagram is mancitroxie. Yeah, I think that's it. There you go. There you go. Order the book, folks. Also go see everything

we're doing on goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, The Chris Voss Show on, of course, YouTube as well and every place else on the internet.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.