Log kya kahenge? What will people say? A WION editor wrote in 2025 that this one line “is enough to make people do things they don’t want to do.”
Naak kat gayi. The nose was cut off. Disgrace.
Saat pusht ki naak katna. The nose of seven generations is cut off. In the Rekhta dictionary: the honor of the whole family is lost.
Sharma ji ka beta, Sharma ji’s son, is the neighbor’s model child. Indian parents hold him up to their own children. As Scroll put it, they “go on and on” about him.
The phrase has become an internet joke. A writer in Tweak India notes that it “has long symbolised middle-class respectability.”
In 2024 the investment firm Jefferies estimated the Indian wedding market at about 130 billion dollars a year. The average wedding cost about 12 lakh rupees, roughly five times India’s GDP per person.
According to the report, that is nearly twice what Indian families spend on 18 years of a child’s education.
In 1956 Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Railway Minister, offered to resign after a train accident at Mahbubnagar. Prime Minister Nehru persuaded him to stay. After a second accident, at Ariyalur in November, Shastri resigned again. “It will be good for me and the Government as a whole, if I quietly quit the office I hold,” he wrote.
Nehru accepted, while saying he did not hold Shastri responsible. Sources differ on the death tolls of both accidents.
In 1999 Tata Motors considered selling its young car business to Ford. Pravin Kadle, who was in the Tata team, later described the meeting in Detroit: “For nearly three hours, we discussed the sell-off with Ford officials but were meted out humiliating treatment.”
In 2008 Tata Motors bought Jaguar Land Rover from Ford for 2.3 billion dollars. Ford’s chairman Bill Ford reportedly told Tata: “You are doing us a big favour by buying JLR.” The account comes from people present, not from any record.
In March 2018 the Supreme Court decided Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, a case about killings of couples in the name of family honor. The court held that khap panchayats, village caste councils, have no authority to interfere with an adult’s choice of a partner.
“Class honour, howsoever perceived, cannot smother the choice of an individual,” the court wrote. The activities of such councils, it said, “are to be stopped in entirety.”
Until June 2020, users of Shaadi.com, a large Indian matrimonial site, could search for a partner by skin tone, among them “fair,” “wheatish” and “dark.”
Hetal Lakhani, a woman of Indian origin in the United States, started a petition against the filter. It gathered about 1,500 signatures in 14 hours. The site removed the filter and called it a “blind spot.”
In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), Yash Raichand, played by Amitabh Bachchan, heads a wealthy family. His adopted son Rahul falls in love with Anjali, a young woman from Chandni Chowk, an old trading quarter of Delhi. Yash wants him to marry a family friend instead.
Rahul marries Anjali, and Yash disowns him. The family is apart for ten years.