As expected, the ladla beta squad jumps in

When Smriti Mandhana announced that her wedding had been called off, a quiet shiver went through the country. Not because breakups are unusual, but because betrayal — especially when inflicted on someone as accomplished and beloved as Smriti — feels like a national insult. She is a World Cup champion, a youth icon, a woman who has earned every ounce of her success. If even she cannot escape heartbreak, what hope do the rest of us have?

But the deeper sickness here is not the cheating alone. Heartbreak is painful but not uncommon. What is far more disturbing is the cultural machinery that activates the moment a man’s reputation is at risk. The ladla beta defence squad — also known as the Indian family — jumps into formation.

Suddenly, timelines shift. Narratives soften. Statements are issued. Stories are “clarified”.

We saw versions of this unfold even before Smriti spoke publicly: the insistence that everything was fine, that the wedding was simply postponed, that there’s nothing to see here, folks. Except there was something to see. And Smriti finally said it out loud.

This is what Milan Vohra captures with precision in her latest book, ‘Heartbreak Unfiltered’. Vohra writes not just about romantic failures but about the structures surrounding them, the emotional architecture women are forced to live inside. She breaks down, with humour and honesty, how women are trained to absorb male failures as personal defeats, while men are socialised to believe that accountability is optional.

In her trademark blend of memoir and tough-love manual, Vohra reveals heartbreak as both deeply intimate and deeply cultural: an earthquake whose fault lines lie far beyond the relationship itself.

Smriti’s experience — even without knowing its private details — slots painfully well into Vohra’s thesis. Because here is the truth: Indian men don’t become entitled on their own. They are raised that way — polished, protected, and pardoned by families who treat their sons as fragile dynasties that must be preserved at all costs. When a mistake happens, the instinct is not remorse — it is reputation management. The family becomes a PR agency. The narrative becomes negotiable. And the woman becomes collateral damage.

What could have been dignified — an honest acknowledgement, a simple acceptance of responsibility — mutates into something insidious: deflection, denial, and damage control. That is the real sickness. Not that only men make mistakes — we all do — but that they are taught they never have to own them.

Meanwhile, the woman is left holding the emotional shrapnel. She is expected to cope quietly, respectably, and without disturbing the delicate ecosystem of male comfort. Her heartbreak becomes her burden alone. Her humiliation becomes an anecdote. Her healing becomes a self-funded project.

Vohra writes that heartbreak splits a woman’s life into “before” and “after” — not because of the man, but because of the gaslighting ecosystem around him. The institutions that protect him. The elders who excuse him. The cousins who say she’s lying, not him. The society that tells her to be graceful while he is allowed to be careless.

But here is the twist in Smriti Mandhana’s story: she got out early. She did not find out 10 years later, after two kids, after having contorted her life into a shape palatable to a man who didn’t deserve her. She didn’t stay because families begged her to. She didn’t cling to the illusion because society demands that women salvage relationships and reputations simultaneously.

Instead, she did the most radical thing a woman can do in this culture: she walked away before the wreckage could engulf her.

It takes courage to leave before marriage. It takes self-respect to leave publicly. And it takes clarity — divine clarity — to leave when every voice around you is trying to rewrite your reality.

Call it timing. Call it instinct. Call it the universe stepping in like a protective elder sister. Smriti Mandhana was not ruined. She was rescued.

The betrayal will, of course, stay with her. Heartbreak always does. It rewires you, strengthens you, scars you in places only you can see. But what would have stayed with her far longer is the slow erosion of self that comes from loving a man cushioned by denial and carried by enablers.

She escaped that fate. What happened to her is not a failure. It is a filter. A filter that removed a man who wasn’t ready. A filter that exposed a system that still favours men over truth. A filter that saved her from a future she did not deserve.

In a country where women are forever picking up the broken pieces of men’s choices, Smriti did something extraordinary: she dropped the pieces and walked away whole. And in that departure lies her real victory.

— The writer is an acclaimed author