Man in UP pays Rs 50,000 for a bride and... it's a boy!

Setting an example for stupidity and desperation, a man from Uttar Pradesh paid Rs 50,000 to get married. But to his great disappointment, he later discovered that the ‘bride’ he had paid for turned out to be a boy. [caption id=“attachment_1797797” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] 37-year-old bachelor Balak Ram, who was known to be mentally unstable, gave Rs 50,000 to a dance troupe leader Hukkam Singh who promised to find him a bride, according to this report from The Times of India. Eventually, Hukkam Singh introduced Balak Ram to 29-year-old Raj Kumari and they got married. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this incident is that Balam Ram was married for an entire week before he found out that Raj Kumari was actually 15-year-old Raj Kumar. As if this story was not disturbing enough, The Times of India also reported that even after his true identity was revealed, Raj Kumar “does not mind occasionally wearing the saree.” Moreover, Balak Ram is also happy to pose with his new “bride”, said the report. However, India is not the only place for such weird twists to tales of marriage. According to another report in Quartz, men in China have to pay amounts as high as $24,000 to get a bride. “The tradition was originally conceived to provide for the bride’s aging parents, since she would presumably be caring for her husband’s parents as they aged,” said the report. But this tradition is still alive in China because of the worsening gender disparity in the Chinese population and bias for the male child. The number of men is a lot more than that of women in the country, because of which men are now even willing to pay to get married.