‘Illiterate’ groom? Brides go vroom, vroom!

They are runaway brides alright, but unlike Julia Roberts in the rom-com Runaway Bride these Bihari women are not running away from personal insecurities, but poorly qualified grooms. Prashant Ranjan reports.

They are runaway brides alright, but unlike Julia Roberts in the rom-com Runaway Bride these Bihari women are not running away from personal insecurities, but poorly qualified grooms.

Last Saturday, a 21-year-old woman left the wedding mandap when she discovered that the groom was struggling to add up currency notes while handing over the priest’s fee before the wedding rituals began.

“I cannot place my future in the hands of an illiterate person”, said the young woman from Bhojpur district of south central Bihar, who is herself not a high school graduate.

On May 22, another woman from Bhojpur called off her wedding at the 11th hour because the groom could not answer some ‘brain teasers’ posed by her friends. She said she could not marry a man with such low IQ.

In Ara too, a man who had claimed to be an assistant manager with a Delhi firm found himself royally dumped, when his fiancée called his bluff

Suspicious of his claim when she asked him to write down the address of his company, she discovered that he was not literate. The man had no choice but to confess and the wedding was history.

Heavy metals land engineer in trouble

He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but when the Bihar police raided the house of a government engineer on Thursday, they found a silver pressure cooker, three silver spittoons, 13 kg silver, 15 sets of diamond jewellery and 1.5 kg gold.

Those apart, Awadhesh Mandal, who is an executive engineer of the building construction department of Muzaffarpur also has 25 bank accounts and investments running into crores, claim officials of the Economic Offences Unit team of the Bihar Police.

“He owned two flats and a shop in Patna. He was an engineer, but he lived like a king,” said an official.