On the Ketan Agarwal murder, choices, and the conversations we are having instead of the ones we should be.
If Siya Goyal had the strength to plan a murder, coordinate it with another person, return to the same location where she had already tried once, and go through with it, what exactly was she afraid of?
Not her parents. Clearly not.
So what are we really talking about when we say she had no choice? Because a person with no choice does not plan, rehearse, come back and try again. A person with no choice does not have a backup plan. Siya had one. His name was Chetan.
And yet here we are, explaining her.
A 26-year-old man is dead. His fiancée and her boyfriend did it together. This was not a moment of madness. This was thought through, step by step, and carried out. And before the investigation could even breathe, the internet had already decided what the story was about.
It was about his hair patch, his parents, and an entire generation of young people who apparently needed to be defended.
That shift is what I want to talk about.
The Ketan Agarwal Case: Before Everyone Decided What It Meant
On June 18, 2026, Ketan Agrawal went on a birthday trek to Lohagad Fort with his fiancée Siya Goyal. It was supposed to be a celebration.
What investigators found was not a crime of passion. Siya and her boyfriend Chetan Chaudhary had planned this carefully. They had visited the fort in advance to decide where and how to do it. They had a signal. Siya would sit down on the ground, and Chetan, who was already hiding there, would push Ketan off the cliff.
According to reports, this was not even the first attempt. Ketan had survived an earlier incident at that same location. He managed to hold on to a bush and pull himself up. Siya told him that she had been trying to save him from a snake and the innocent guy took her word for it and came back to the fort with her again.
The news broke. And before any of these details had even surfaced, before anyone had waited to understand what actually happened, the internet had already written its verdict.
Most of it was not about justice for Ketan. It was about explaining Siya.
The Story That Got Written Before the Facts Arrived
“Forced marriage.” “She was trapped.” “Parents should listen to their children.” “This is what happens when you do not give your kids a choice.”
Post after post, like after like, people lining up to explain why a planned murder made sense if you looked at it from the right angle.
And I want to ask, what angle is that, exactly?
Siya’s own parents said in an interview that they asked her and she agreed to get married. According to her parents, she told them herself she had no problem with Ketan. Maybe they are lying and are trying to protect themselves. That is possible, and I am not dismissing it.
But here is what is not possible to dismiss. She had the courage to coordinate a killing with her boyfriend and visit the location in advance. And we are supposed to believe she did not have the courage to say “no” to her parents?
That argument does not hold. And I think most people pushing it know that.
A Senior Writer Made a Dead Man the Punchline
Now this is the part that made my blood boil. And honestly, it broke my heart a little too. Not just because of what she wrote, but because young people look up to senior voices like her. And what they just learned is that it is okay to make a joke out of someone’s death if you are clever enough about it.
A senior writer, someone with decades of writing behind her and a platform that reaches thousands, chose to write about this case. She did not say the murder was justified. She was far too clever for that. What she did instead was write the whole thing like it was an entertaining piece of gossip. The murder became a “cliff hanger.” Ketan’s hair patch got its own paragraph and Siya’s boyfriend was described as “hatta katta” with a full head of hair, as though we were comparing two profiles on a matrimonial website, not discussing a man who was killed. Siya was a “trapped girl.” Ketan was, apparently, just not the right fit.
In the middle of all this, she found time to crack a joke about baldness and complete it with a Bollywood celebrity reference to make it land. A man was dead and the column was busy being witty about hair loss treatment. That is not commentary. That’s a comedy set at a funeral.
A father has lost his son. And this is the response from a senior writer with a prominent platform.
This is what indirect justification looks like. You do not have to say murder is okay. You just keep pointing at the hair patch, keep calling her trapped, keep making the dead man the inconvenient variable, and the reader slowly starts thinking maybe she had a point. That is how it works.
Unhe bilkul Shobhaa nahi deta. Itne saalon ki kalamkari ke baad, ek insaan ki maut par aise likhna, jaise koi timepass gossip column ho, SHOBHAA toh nahi deta.
And the prominent media platform that chose to publish this piece… unhe PRINT karna tha toh kuch aur PRINT karte. Having a platform is a responsibility. Not every piece that arrives in your inbox deserves to go live.
Let me ask you something directly. If your own son had a hair loss problem, does that make his life worth less? Does that give someone the right to end it? Because that is the logic this column was built on, however wittily it was dressed up.
Be feminist. Please. The world genuinely needs more of it. But feminism is not a shield for premeditated murder. It never was. Feminism fights for women who are wronged, not for women who wrong others and then ask the movement to cover for them.
One Person’s Choice Is Not an Entire Generation’s Character
Then came the Gen Z debate. Of course it did.
“This is what Gen Z is like.” “They are too sensitive.” “They justify everything.” “This generation has no values”, all negatives positives and what not?
I want to say this as clearly as possible. Siya Goyal’s choices do not speak for an entire generation of young Indians. One person’s actions do not define 377 million people. That is not how generations work. That is not how people work.
You know what Gen Z is also doing right now? There are teenagers building platforms that help daily wage workers earn fair pay. There are young people taking the worst experiences of their lives and turning them into something that protects others. There are also 21-year-olds from small towns with no resources, doing things that people with every advantage never got around to doing.
Nobody gave them perfect environments and handed them parents who always got it right. But they made choices. And they owned those choices.
Because at some point, no matter what your childhood looked like, what your parents did or did not do, you are the one standing in front of the decision. That belongs to you. Nobody else.
Parenting Matters. And It Is Also Not the Point Right Now.
Now, am I saying that parenting doesn’t matter? No, it absolutely does. I genuinely believe that. A home where a child feels safe to speak, to push back, to say no, that matters deeply. If we want to have a conversation about how Indian families handle marriage pressure, about how children are raised to comply rather than communicate, I am fully there for that conversation.
But that conversation is not this one.
Because here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. If Siya had the courage to plan and participate in a murder, she had the courage to say ‘NO’ to a marriage. Those two things cannot both be true at the same time. Either she had a voice or she did not. And allegations suggest, she had one, that’s why she was comfortable enough to plan something this big.
When you make a choice, you own what follows. You cannot plan something this deliberate, this calculated, and then tell the world your circumstances made you do it. You do not get to take someone’s life and then hand the responsibility to your parents.
People Who Had It Harder Did Not Do This.
There are people in this country who grew up in homes far more restrictive than Siya’s. Where they had no say in anything at all. Where silence was the only safe option every single day. Where saying no to a parent was genuinely unimaginable.
And those people, many of them, grew up, carried all of that weight, and chose not to become people who hurt others.
Siya was not the first person to feel trapped. She will not be the last. But she is the one who made this particular choice. And that matters. Because the circumstances do not make the choice, the person does.
They did not get viral threads explaining why their pain justified whatever they wanted to do next. They just lived. Made hard decisions. Tried to be better than what they were handed. Some of them are extraordinary. Most of them are quietly ordinary. All of them made choices.
Because that is always, in the end, what it comes down to.
On Empathy and Where It Is Going
People are grieving Ketan. Many across the country are angry and demanding justice for him. That is real and that matters.
But a significant number of people have directed their empathy primarily toward Siya. They are posting about the pressure she must have felt. Building a case for why she had no other way out. Finding the angle that makes her the one who deserves to be understood.
To those people I want to ask directly, what about him?
What about a 26-year-old who went on a birthday trek and did not make it home? What about his father, sitting somewhere and watching the internet spend more column space on his dead son’s hair than on his son? What about every young person quietly watching this and registering that if you are inconvenient enough, unattractive enough, simply in someone’s way, your life can be treated as the problem to be solved?
Empathy is good. Have it. The world needs more of it, not less. But when it flows automatically and completely toward the person who planned and executed a murder, it is worth stopping and asking yourself why. What story have you told yourself that makes that feel right?
A murder is a murder.
We can talk about forced marriages and we should, in the right space, with the right care. We can talk about how families communicate, how young people feel unheard, how parenting in India needs to change. All of that is worth saying.
But not here. Not over his body and not by turning the conversation so far away from what actually happened that the man who died barely appears in his own story.
The question is not whether difficult circumstances deserve empathy. They do. The question is: at what point does our empathy become so consuming that we forget the person whose life was taken?
Ketan Agrawal was 26 years old. He had a whole life ahead of him. He went on a birthday trek and did not come back.
Everything else, the hair patch, the generation debate, the parenting conversation, can wait.
