Episode 1: The Vow
Love Commandos Is Available Right Now
Hello, it’s Gregory, and if you’re new here you can read more about me and this newsletter here. I also host the NPR podcast, Rough Translation, out today with a brand new season called Love Commandos. Subscribe to this newsletter to get behind the scenes stories and join an ongoing discussion about the season.
Love Commandos, Episode 1: The Vow
On Episode 1 of Love Commandos: Mansi Choksi, author of The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India, recalls a defining feature of growing up in India as a child of the 90s: an era of Bollywood romances that celebrated crossing boundaries of caste and faith. Sometimes these star-crossed love stories ended with a wedding. Other times: death. In both cases, Choksi says, the message was that “love is something worth fighting for.”
But in a country where something like 97% of marriages are arranged, marrying without your parents’ blessing might have serious consequences: being ostracized or disowned, or forced into hiding, arrested, or - in rare and extreme cases - killed. On the podcast, you hear Mansi struggling to reconcile this gap between the love stories she watched on screen and the rules of love that everyone was expected to follow. What would it take for love couples to find protection? One day in 2012, Choksi turned on the TV and saw a man who promised an answer. Sanjoy Sachdev is co-founder of the Love Commandos, a group that pledges to shelter and protect young lovers.
The Love Commandos made a brazen promise. But at what cost? This is the question that will send Choksi - and NPR correspondent Lauren Frayer, who spent years on this investigation - on an epic journey, following couples who pass through the Love Commandos’ shelter. It’s an adventurous ride. Click here to subscribe on your podcast player of choice.
Love As A Litmus Test
Why is this NPR’s last season of Rough Translation? People are asking me that. (When we started this reporting, I didn’t expect this to be our last.) But in a way, it’s fitting to go out with a love story. When I started Rough Translation six years ago, I wanted to tell stories from around the world that ask us to take a closer look at ourselves and our own assumptions. Love Commandos is that kind of story. It’s about something - romantic love, in an arranged marriage context - that is so easy to misunderstand. The season unfolds slowly (too slowly?), so these questions really start to come up in Episode 3. But give it time. It’s worth the journey.
And as you listen, come back here and we’ll discuss! Meanwhile, for more stories of love as a lens into a place, I recently posted about love stories as a lens for understanding income inequality in China. Also, one of my early stories for This American Life was about two aid workers I met in Afghanistan who had a storybook romance, got married, then decided to use the money they would have gotten in wedding gifts to fundraise for their Afghan driver’s dowry. That way, they believed, he too could have his own fairy tale romance and marry the woman of his dreams. (They should have known their plan would go awry. Though it is painful now, with the awful news coming daily from Afghanistan, to listen back to this story where the biggest danger was a colossal mismatch of intentions.)
I mention that This American Life story not because I’m a romantic (possibly I am… but that’s a subject for a different post) but because it might surprise those who’ve not been there how much time Afghans spend talking about love; or how in a place where there is little room for romantic experimentation, people double down on true love as an all or nothing bet. Of course, making a bet on true love in Afghanistan, instead of accepting the match your parents choose for you, also means taking on a debt — to family, to society — that you might not be able to afford.
In the This American Life story, the American couple believe they can cover that debt. They believe it’s just a question of money. But money can’t buy you love, nor can it buy you freedom to choose love. Not without another bill coming due.
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P.S.
I just had an amazing chat this morning with Hanaa Tameez of the Neiman Journalism Lab. We talked about the thoughtful use of Hindi - and Hinglish - in this season. I’ll talk about that more in a future post, but for now, for any radio producers out there, here’s further reading about various ways to use non-English language tape in radio stories.
Just listened, it sounds like it is going to be a great season! (98% of India still does arranged marriage, is that real?)