Pune’s Siya Goyal–Ketan Agarwal–Chetan Chowdhry case has literally rocked the nation over the past few weeks. For those unfamiliar, 20-year-old Siya Goyal was engaged to Ketan Agarwal in an arranged marriage. However, Siya was actually dating Chetan Chowdhry. On June 18, during a trek to Lohegaon Fort near Pune, Siya and Chetan allegedly pushed Ketan off the fort, killing him.
This is obviously an extreme, outlier case. It is also still under investigation. Hence, all the caveats and disclaimers apply, and this piece is not an attempt to opine on the specific case.
If someone did kill Ketan, they deserve punishment. It is as simple as that.
Whether this particular case ultimately proves to be about family pressure is for the courts to determine. What it has undeniably done, however, is reignite a conversation that millions of young Indians immediately recognized: how much control should parents continue to exercise over their adult children’s lives?
Apparently, according to police statements reported in the media, Siya did not simply call off the wedding (instead of allegedly killing Ketan) because she hesitated, believing that cancelling it would bring her parents too much “shame.” So hesitant that she would rather kill the guy? Well, talk about the shame they are facing now.
And this is the reality of many Indian families that we need to discuss: parental control over their children’s lives that never ends. From biscuits to brides, Indian parents want to decide everything for you—how you will live your life, what you will eat or drink, how you will pray, what you will wear, who you will date (nobody), whom you will marry (the person we choose, with three-factor authentication of caste, community, and religion), when you will copulate, and when you will have children. Miss a beat, and all kinds of emotional manipulations begin – silent treatments, loud tears, even suicide threats.
In Siya’s case, at least from the on-camera statements given by the girl’s parents, the parents: a) neither had a clue that their daughter had a boyfriend (the whole country does now), b) knew she wasn’t keen on getting married, even though the marriage was fixed when she was 19 (seriously, guys), nor c) realized that she did not want to marry Ketan, the person they had chosen for her.
As a side note, with no real bearing on the case, Siya’s parents they were unaware that their daughter consumed alcohol, even though multiple public posted videos of Siya drinking exist social media. Only shows clueless parents, trying to run their children’s lives even as the children live a different reality.
It isn’t just about Siya or this case. The problem is that this is representative of Indian parents even today, particularly in business families. Those ₹10-crore to ₹500-crore SME-type families who behave like little kings running their empires. This is a massive amount of money in India. These families feel rich and big, unaware of the fact that they are small fries in a global pool of entrepreneurs, where we now even have a trillionaire.
These crorepatis hire an army of servants in cheap-labour land that is India. They run their businesses exactly as their parents or grandparents did decades ago, with zero innovation, vision, R&D or ideas about changing the future. Usually, these are boring businesses like sanitary tiles, steel commodity parts, and chemical plants. Many are content with preserving what previous generations built rather than reinventing it. The business survives, but ambition often shifts from building better companies to maintaining family status.
With massive comfort at home and little innovation or drive at the office, these businessmen have little to occupy their minds productively. Instead, they channel their ambitions into social status rather than innovation. They spend their time obsessing over vanity, displaying wealth, perceived respect in society, and seeking validation from other SME types.
What better way to get that validation than by controlling your children and their pointless, lavish weddings? You get to display your wealth, with a wedding budget that would put Elon Musk’s next venture to shame. You also get to show-off a compliant child—someone who married the person of your choice.
For at least a few moments, the hollow, regressive, and shallow business family gets validation from the world as they burn fireworks and crores at destination weddings, packing off their nubile daughters.
Social media is replete with statements from other girls expressing empathy for Siya—yes, an alleged murderer— about the pressure she might have felt in simply calling off the wedding. “We get it,” many progressive Gen-Z girls say when they hear that Siya could not tell her parents that she loved another man.
Kids grow up. They turn into adults. Adults fall in love and date. Adults like to live their own lives. Free will, liberty, or agency over one’s own life is a fundamental human need. Revolutions have been fought over it, and people have died for it. When will our Indian parents understand this? When will our business families realize that their children are not trophy cattle to be paraded for display? And those mega-budget weddings are simply tacky and gross?
Maybe spend that money on R&D? Make something other than ball bearings that your granddaddy made eighty years ago. Ever looked at China’s business sector? Never thought of building robotics companies instead of trying to find rishtas for your daughter and blowing ₹10 crore on a wedding in Udaipur?
Is it all the parents’ fault, though? Is Gen Z totally off the hook? No.
First, in this case, the Gen-Z kids are the accused. If the accusations are indeed true, it is serious problem. Eliminating a person instead of having the courage to stand up to your outdated dad and mom is weak, lame, and borderline evil.
In general, Gen Z needs to stand the hell up to these regressive practices at home. The day you agree to bend a little—meet that rishta when you didn’t want to, sneak away and have a beer when you could have simply told them you had a drink, or say yes to a match when you were seeing someone else—you encourage more regressive behaviour from your parents. Stop. Stand up. Tell the previous generation they are wrong. It’s okay. India has suffered far too much and remained far too backward for the sake of this phony “respect” for elders.
There’s one more issue with Gen-Z kids from business families that makes it especially hard for them to stand up to their parents. Another reason many second-generation business heirs struggle to push back is that they inherit comfort before they earn independence. Financial dependence makes emotional independence much harder.
They never study well, never earn good qualifications, never learn business properly, and never develop the hunger or drive to take it to the next level.
As a result, they are utterly dependent on Daddy to fund their lives. The euphemism these kids use for it is “my support system,” which is a crutch in reality. You grew up in comfort. You never learned how to be uncomfortable and succeed. You never learnt how the real world works.
Now Daddy and Mommy pay all the bills and fund your decadent lifestyle, so it isn’t easy to stand up to them. There’s no free lunch, dinner, or designer handbag in life, my friend. If you are dependent on them, they will control you. They will marry you to whoever they want and tell you how to and tell you how to eat, drink, sleep—and even whom to sleep with.
Want to live your own life? Become somebody. Then stand up to them. Don’t just sit in Daddy’s office selling steel pipes and rubber wires like your father and uncle did. Grow the hell up. And please say no to those garish wedding sets for your special day. You look like a stage exhibit.
The time has come to call out those in India’s affluent yet regressive society, which is doing a great disservice to our economy, to businesses that remain mediocre, and drive Gen Z to a point that that they feel suffocated. Stifled to the point that some may feel driven to extreme actions. It is time for a wider discussion on how our business families need to change and get rid of an outdated value system.
And no more tacky, film-set, blow a city’s budget up type weddings, please.