By Rahul:
I am one of the victims of a society that believes caste holds more primacy than their son or daughter's happiness. A society that is ready to kill their daughters and sons for their false pride. I am not talking about those people who live in cities, but I am talking about most of us who live in villages and face the stigma of caste more than others.
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I belong to a middle-class family. My family always wanted to give me a world- class education. Through my education, I learnt many things, and one of them was the idea that there is nothing called caste-ism. I soon discovered that love does not have any boundary. I started looking for a girl who can love me my whole life because that would make me happy. I trusted my intelligence when it came to making a decision for myself. I fell in love a number of times with different girls but was not able to propose marriage to any one of them. So I stopped trying. In 2013, I met a girl on a train. I fell in love with her simplicity. After a few months, we realized that we are perfect for each other, and it is time to convince our parents for our marriage. But we knew that persuading them would be difficult. My parents always reiterated, 'marry a Brahmin or else we will cut you into pieces'. When I told them about my love, they started looking a girl for me because they thought I would marry that non-Brahmin girl.
I tried to convince everyone in my family and close relations, but nobody was ready to listen to me. They started threatening me.
We started pondering on a solution, which led us to believe that the only thing we could do was run away from that kind of atmosphere where no one was thinking about our happiness before their ego. Somehow we came up with a plan and left that place in the winter of 2014. We came to Delhi and for a few weeks stayed with one of my cousins who is also a victim of this menace. He helped us and soon I started working.
After a few weeks, we got married through the Arya Samaj. [envoke_twitter_link]We have to stay isolated from my whole family just because I married a girl whom I loved[/envoke_twitter_link]. I cannot give my address to anyone because if I give it, there would be a problem. I looked for help from government and non-governmental organizations, but there was no one to help me. I found no law that could help people like me in this kind of a situation. Our law allows inter-caste marriage but has no provision to protect people who do marry outside their caste.
For how long can love be dominated in the name of caste and religion? After almost 70 years of our Independence why do we revel in thoughts like, 'marry a brahmin', 'don’t marry a lower caste', 'they are not from our caste', etc. We should be allowed the freedom to choose our life partners. For how long will this chaos will go on? When will society take a step to finish off these evils? This social evil has eaten up many lives and unfortunately, it still continues till date. Today I am unable to live a normal life, just because I chose to marry for love, outside my caste.
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