Arranged Marriages ... for Mom & Dad

Tara Jadhav was 49 when she lost her husband. Married for almost 29 years, she started feeling the pangs of loneliness soon after her partner’s death. “I cried for months,” she says. Her son, Sushant Zala, and his wife, Neha, couldn’t bear the grief she was going through. So, they decided to convince her to remarry — and to help find her a match. “It was awkward at first,” says Tara, who’s based in Ahmedabad, India. But soon she agreed because, as her daughter-in-law put it, “she was still young.”

Sushant and Neha discovered Vina Mulya Amulya Sewa, a nonprofit organization founded by 69-year-old Natubhai Patel that holds matchmaking events — called swayamvars — where senior Indians, typically older than 50, can meet and find a partner they want to live with. Tara met Dhanji Jadhav, a 57-year-old employee of the Indian multinational oil and gas giant ONGC at a swayamvar, and her son and daughter-in-law arranged their wedding. It was a dramatic twist on Indian tradition, where parents have for centuries been the ones tasked with finding partners for their kids and organizing marriages. But Sushant and Neha are part of a rising number of Indians flipping that equation on its head.

Things done changed. One week ago, the Colts were a tasty Super Bowl sleeper pick with a young, nasty offensive line finally capable of protecting its future Hall of Fame quarterback.

Then their luck ran out.

Andrew Luck’s decision to retire at 29, entering the prime of his career, was shocking but makes sense the more you think about it. Luck is opting to walk away with his body largely intact and inquisitive mind salvaged. It’s easy to imagine other players wanting to follow suit.

I arrived at Javier’s house in the mountains of Sinaloa after a two-hour drive from Culiacán. It was early February, so the punishing summer humidity had not yet arrived. The sleepy town where Javier lives with his wife and two children is a farming community, and it’s a world away from the brash, urban reality of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa.

Violence in Culiacán is so common that the city recently made headlines for having a week with no reported murders.

Up in the mountains, Javier’s family has survived for generations by selling cannabis and heroin poppy paste to the cartels. As demand for both of those products plummets, could new, legal, non-high-producing plant products be his salvation from looming poverty?