He'd heard her voice over a cubicle in the back of the store and was dazzled by how she'd calm angry customers. India is at once an emerging global power and a deeply traditional society - an example of non-Western modernity. Development doesn't mean adopting Western values. ![]() It feels inevitable that lots of them will also fall in love.īut since India's economy opened up in the early 1990s, statistics on love marriage haven't changed. As it gets richer, more women are going to college, joining the formal workforce (though I've reported on some irregularities with that) and mixing with people outside their families and faiths. India has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. It's a place full of optimism - perhaps dangerously so. It's an electronics chain (think Best Buy) with endless rows of washing machines, ACs and flat-screen TVs - all the gleaming must-have accessories for membership in India's booming new middle class. Theirs was a workplace romance in a setting that, for me, embodies India's economic rise more than anywhere else: Vijay Sales. She's Muslim he follows the Jain religion. Zarina, 32, and Saumil, who is 34, grew up only a couple of miles apart, in separate communities with little crossover. They hope it will help them heal, help their relatives someday accept their marriage, and leave a record for the next generation - their twin baby girls. Love, she said, "is a river of fire you have to drown in to cross."Įight years after they met, and five years after I met them, they've given me permission to finally tell the full story of their daring journey to be together. "Bollywood is just a three-hour hunky-dory thing. "No movie matches our story," Zarina once told me. His rise and fall is the topic of an NPR podcast I've spent the past five years reporting called Love Commandos. He denies that, and is still awaiting trial. In early 2019, months after my visit, the group's founder, Sanjoy Sachdev, was arrested for allegedly extorting money from couples in his care. This was a shelter run by the Love Commandos, a vigilante group that helps Indians avoid arranged marriages, rescues them from possible harm at the hands of their families - even including so-called honor killings - and helps them elope with a partner of their own choosing. They told me truncated versions of their love stories, glossing over the violence they'd escaped and emphasizing the relief they felt at reaching relative safety. When I turned on my microphone, they were courteous, if curt. The lovers - four couples - blinked in the light when I opened the door. The mint-green walls were streaked with handprints and grime. They crowded cross-legged onto foam floor mats in a windowless room, their knees touching. NEW DELHI - Five years ago, up a steep staircase in a seedy part of India's capital, I met eight beleaguered young lovers. Getty Images and NPR/Photo illustration: Vartika Sharma for NPR The film premiered at Brooklyn's Williamsburg International Film Festival dubbed "WILLiFEST" on September 23, 2011.Saumil and Zarina sit on the floor at the Love Commandos shelter in New Delhi. ![]() Williams, Michael Mosley and Nashawn Kearse. The film stars James McDaniel, Michael K. You're Nobody 'til Somebody Kills You is a 2011 film directed by Michael A.
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