I Refuse To Let The Kumar Sisters Become A Culture War.

Three girls died. Instead of asking what failed them, too many people chose to blame Korean culture.

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash.

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There is a special kind of rage that comes from watching a tragedy become a moral panic before the dead are even allowed to become human.

When I first read about the Kumar sisters case, I felt sick. Three girls gone. Three young lives flattened into headlines about phones, K-dramas, Korean games, “obsession” and “foreign culture.” Nishika, Prachi and Pakhi were not allowed the dignity of complexity. They became a cautionary tale. A warning to parents. A convenient headline for every adult who has ever looked at a young girl’s private world and decided it was dangerous simply because it was not obedient, Indian enough, or easy to control.

And yes, I am angry.

I am angry not just because I love Korean culture. This is not me being defensive because I watch K-dramas, listen to K-pop, or understand why a teenager in India might find comfort in a world that feels softer, prettier, more emotionally expressive, or more imaginative than the one around her. My anger is bigger than fandom. It is about the lazy, xenophobic convenience of blaming “Korean culture” for what looks like a much deeper family, emotional, educational and social failure.

Because when a father says, in effect, that Korean culture killed his daughters, what does that do? It moves the spotlight away from the home. Away from control. Away from isolation. Away from the adult decisions around those girls. Away from the questions that should make everyone deeply uncomfortable.

And what still haunts me is how many suspicious, uncomfortable details were sitting right there, almost begging to be examined, while everyone rushed to blame Korea. The family structure itself was complicated. There were reports of fights, emotional distress, financial pressure, isolation, and the girls not going to school for two years, which should have been treated as a glaring emergency instead of a side note. How does a child’s education get taken away for that long without everyone around them asking what is happening inside that home? How do three girls become so cut off from the outside world that fantasy starts looking like survival, and still the loudest explanation becomes “foreign culture”? I am not claiming to know exactly what happened behind those walls. But I do know that when girls are isolated, controlled, pulled out of school, and surrounded by adult chaos, it is obscene to reduce their pain to K-dramas, phones and fandom.

That is what makes me furious.

There is a long, ugly tradition in Indian society of blaming girls for the ways they try to survive. A girl reads romance novels? Too much imagination. She dresses differently? Bad influence. She likes Korean idols? She is forgetting her culture. She wants privacy? She is hiding something. She wants freedom? She is spoiled. She wants a life outside the script written for her? She has been corrupted.

Indian girls are constantly told to be careful, grateful, modest, disciplined, respectful, domestic, academic, traditional, modern-but-not-too-modern, ambitious-but-not-too-loud. And when they break under the weight of all that contradiction, society looks for the nearest villain that is not patriarchy.

In this case, that villain became Korea.

But Korean culture did not create Indian misogyny. Korean dramas did not invent authoritarian parenting. K-pop did not invent the idea that fathers own their daughters’ futures. A foreign language did not make adults dismiss teenage distress until it was too late. If anything, the girls’ attachment to Korean names, stories, aesthetics and online worlds should have been read as a cry for escape, not proof of moral failure.

I am not saying unrestricted internet use is harmless. I am not saying children should be abandoned to algorithms, parasocial fantasy, gaming loops or digital isolation. Of course not. But there is a difference between concern and control. There is a difference between parenting and domination. There is a difference between helping a child return to reality and ripping away the only reality where she feels seen.

What enrages me about Chetan Kumar’s public framing is the entitlement beneath it: the idea that he could dictate what his daughters were allowed to love, then blame that love when tragedy arrived. The reported language around “banning Korean culture” feels racist, xenophobic and absurd, but also painfully familiar. It is the same old patriarchal reflex wearing a nationalist mask: our daughters must not be influenced by outside worlds, because outside worlds might teach them desire, rebellion, softness, fantasy, selfhood.

And then there is the media.

Too much of the coverage seemed ready to believe the neatest story: girls addicted to Korean culture die by suicide. It is sensational. It is clickable. It lets audiences feel superior to “obsessed” teenagers. It lets parents nod along and say, “See? Phones are dangerous.” But the more complicated reported details — the debt, the disrupted education, the deleted channel, the cramped and complex family structure, the conflicting statements, the earlier suspicious death that resurfaced in reporting — deserved far more scrutiny than a headline about K-pop madness.

Why is a father’s explanation treated as emotional truth so quickly, while dead girls have to prove they were suffering correctly?

That is the part I cannot stop turning over in my head. There were so many details that should have made people pause: the reported family conflicts, the complicated household structure, the debt, the girls’ disrupted education, the deletion of their YouTube channel, and the way their world seemed to have narrowed long before the final tragedy. But somehow, the easiest villain became “Korean culture.” Not the adults. Not the isolation. Not the fact that three girls were reportedly out of school and slipping further away from normal childhood. Just the thing they loved.

I keep thinking about the fact that I am older than them. I am in my 20s. I have had my own fights with family, money, anxiety, expectations and the suffocating feeling of being an Indian daughter in a world that always has advice for you and rarely has mercy. But I am also grateful that I come from a more liberal, open-minded family, especially because I have a father who supports my interests instead of shaming them. He has seen the way my love for pop culture, fashion, film, music and stories from around the world is not some silly distraction, but something I can turn into taste, knowledge, writing, work and a career (and also I picked up some of the interests from my father and shared it with him). I have had room to love things from other countries. To build an eye. To be dramatic. To obsess. To grow out of phases. To make fandom part of my identity and my skill set without someone acting like I had betrayed my nation.

That gratitude does not make me smug. It makes me sadder.

Because those girls deserved that room too.

They deserved adults who saw their obsession not as disobedience, but as distress. They deserved teachers, relatives, neighbours, media and police asking better questions earlier. They deserved to be more than daughters, more than warnings, more than “Korea-obsessed” girls in a news cycle hungry for blame.

The Kumar sisters were not killed by another country’s culture. They were failed by a world that still panics when girls love something too intensely, especially when that love points beyond the borders of family control.

Let girls have interests. Let them have fantasy. Let them have privacy. Let them have help. Let them have worlds bigger than the room they are trapped in.

And when tragedy happens, do not insult the dead by turning their escape route into the murderer.

So to Chetan Kumar, and to every man who thinks daughters are private property dressed up as family honour: blaming Korean culture will not save you from what angry girls and women around the world can see very clearly. We see the control. We see the misogyny. We see the fear of young women loving something you cannot own, censor or understand. And no, we are not giving up K-dramas, K-pop, fandoms, languages, aesthetics, stories, dreams or any other little window of freedom because men like you are uncomfortable. We will love what we love, loudly and shamelessly.