By Tim Binnall
A young woman in India caused quite the commotion in her community after it was discovered that she had been repeatedly cutting the power to the village in order to secretly meet with her boyfriend who hails from a rival town. The rather Shakespearean love story reportedly began earlier this month in the village of Bettiah when residents started being inexplicably plunged into darkness on a nightly basis. The mysterious predicament was particularly frustrating to those living in the village as the local electric company found no issues which could account for the problem and the blackout conditions allowed thieves and other miscreants to flourish.
The situation ultimately led to some residents forming a posse to keep watch over the community and get to the bottom of the mysterious power outages. Their diligence quickly paid off when the group stumbled upon Priti Kumari meeting with her boyfriend and she confessed to continuously cutting the electricity in order to hide her relationship with the young man as he lives in a rival village. In response, the angry gang of Bettiah residents actually put the proverbial boots to her beau, who escaped the skirmish and then returned with a group of friends in order to resume the fight with some backup of his own.
Fortunately, the strange tale of misguided love wound up having a happy ending as the two rival villages concluded that the situation would best be resolved if the couple simply got married, which they subsequently did at a nearby temple. Time will tell whether or not the nuptials will put an end to whatever disputes had caused a schism to erupt between the communities, though for now residents of Bettiah can at least rest easy knowing that they are unlikely to lose power again any time soon. Should Kumari's scheme sound familiar, that's because she almost certainly got the idea from an incident last year wherein an electrician in India also cut the power to his village in order to secretly meet with his girlfriend under the cloak of darkness.