There is a familiar question that precedes many life choices in most of our homes or any major decision of life – “Hamsai kya wannan, rishtedaar kya wannan?” (“What will the neighbours and relatives say?”). Spoken so casually that it scarcely registers as an intervention, the phrase acts nonetheless as an invisible law. It prescribes the dimensions of homes, the scale of weddings, the schooling of children, and even the allocation of hard-earned savings. What should be a personal choice – guided by means, conviction, and reason- often turns into a public performance where the audience is society, and the cost is one’s individuality.

Stories from across the valley give this phenomenon both texture and consequence. Examples like young men who had saved for years to launch a modest enterprise yielded instead to family pressure and financed a lavish sister’s wedding to match a neighbour’s display. The wedding satisfied the social gaze; the dream of enterprise dissolved. While some are enrolling their kids in expensive private schools, not because of its pedagogy, but because a government school would “raise eyebrows.” These are not isolated anecdotes. They form a repetitive choreography: choices calibrated to outdo or to equal, rather than to fulfil private needs or public good.

The social anthropologist recognizes here a dynamic of honour, face and reciprocal expectation. The psychologist points to conformity experiments – Solomon Asch’s classic studies that demonstrated how individuals abandon their own perceptions to align with a group consensus. When the unit of reference enlarges from family to the neighbourhood, the pressure amplifies; when the observer becomes omnipresent,........

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