How do you create a scenario in which your cricket team loses a match and you lose a spouse? It is difficult but some people are that stupid. This Kanpur based man call Ravinder Singh actually belongs to that category of stupid. He apparently put up his wife as the ante to bet on the outcome of a cricket match and so when his team lost, he lost his spouse. He currently has a police complaint filed against him by his rightly irate wife Jasmeet Kaur.
Then Draupadi, Now Jasmeet
The addiction to gambling can hold one fast in its claws; even our mythology replete with instances of the inveterate gambler who gambled away his all: Yudhishthir gambled away everything he had including his brothers, himself and his wife (as an outraged Draupadi argued later, she was not his to gamble away; especially since Yudhishthir had already pledged and lost and enslaved himself in a previous round of gambling and as such did not posses anything, much less a wife).
In modern day India, women are no longer chattel or property of the men they are related to but this small fact evidently escaped the attention of one Ravinder Singh of Kanpur. When he felt compelled to bet on an IPL encounter, he had no resources left to bet with. He had already lost everything he had to the stock market and had nothing but his wife to gamble with apparently. Previously he had sold off his wife’s jewellery and gambled away other valuables and was set on selling off their house next.
The whole sordid tale came to light when the bookies started to harass his wife Jasmeet Kaur for his gambling debts. She, who owns a boutique, filed a police complaint against her gambler husband who is now missing.
Several questions arise here: how does one put up their wife as a bet and which bookie accepts such a ‘bet’? What kind of person thinks that his wife is his property to gamble away; what century is that man living in? And isn’t it time we recognised gambling for the addiction that it is; an addiction that can and does destroy families and lives instead of brushing it away as harmless waywardness?
Author – Reena Daruwalla
