“I knew exactly what I wanted” are perhaps the scariest words ever said. That is, when a woman says them.

This past week has seen advice, commentary, lecture, opinion, all snowballing into an open panchayat on the cloud to decide if two women — actor Rashmika Mandanna and an ordinary woman in Kolkata — were right to marry the men they married. Except, the participants are strangers — to the two women, the men they married, and their marriages, revealing society’s deep-seated discomfort with female agency.

Rashmika appeared on Koffee with Karan with her husband, fellow actor Vijay Deverakonda, where one of the comments by Vijay — which went viral — was that she had to ask him to marry him a 100 times before he agreed. Apparently, that is all the information people needed to deduce that he “settled for her” and that the request was “humiliating” and that she should “run”. What if Vijay had asked her a 100 times?…