She was being led by her mother. She was to naive to believe her mother's bs. I could have tried to convince her that her mother is only taking her on a path of destruction.
FYI-- here's what a healthy relationship looks like:
1. Someone important to your beloved tries to convince your beloved of X.
2. Because trust extends in both directions between your beloved and you, your beloved tells you, "Someone important to me said to do X."
3. Because your beloved has agency, they follow that statement with something like, "I told them that this is what I think of X."
4. A conversation among two mature adults ensues, with the full range of human emotions in play.
You can do high-tech problem solving with 20/20 hindsight until you drive yourself crazy. But if you didn't have two-way trust, or at least one party didn't realize have adult-level agency, it wasn't a healthy relationship and you should move on to one that is
Seeing your writing inspires the possibility that all significant social processes can have their most critical elements be explicitly written in some form of symbolic language (likely English + additional symbols from math, logic, graphs, etc.). I wonder if there are books or people working on that topic?
Exactly how many Indian extended families have you dealt with? You need to act like Giuliani dealing with the mob if you want to preserve your independence (leverage over their assets, reputations, businesses etc) because they think they own everything. I jest, but not by much.
You can't fish someone out of the mob without them actively wanting to get out, and that requires the person start by relying on their own agency.
Look at the Nxivm cult-- a member was literally starving herself to death and even her own mom had to spend years patiently working with cult deprogrammers before she could convince her to leave (and on threat of FBI prosecution, at that).
Not only is it ineffectual to try to force that person back to sanity-- it's literally counterproductive. It plays into the mob's hand-- an outsider is trying to convince so-and-so to become a rat! You're not a rat, are you, so-and-so?
I'm sorry OP has to go through the heartache of coming to terms with this, if that is indeed anything like what they're going through. But I have to admit to being less concerned with your and OP's blanket warning about Indian families, and vastly more concerned that you and OP apparently think a broad statement like that could somehow justify tapping a loved one's phone. On HN of all places.
To be crystal clear-- if that mom of the Nxivm cult member had actually bugged her daughter's phone at any point in the saga, it would have shattered her trust with her mom and made it impossible for her to ever leave. You get that, right?
I'm not defending bugging the phone. That's a bridge too far for me. You would somehow need to threaten to get their business partners/people they have tea/hookah with in the neighborhood to think they're a bad person to have any leverage (or even more evil but effective when done in public, a bad Muslim/Hindu/X). You need to understand that these families see you as a cash cow or an object to barter to increase access to resources, preserve resources within the family, or increase social status and plan a response accordingly.
Case in point but with an (white) American family. I had a friend whose dad was welshing out on child support for his sisters. My (adult) friend called up a bunch of his dad's clients (he was a contractor) and calmly left messages explaining the situation. His dad paid up but also slapped him with a restraining order and they didn't talk for a decade. I mean being able to threaten going nuclear like that, not necessarily tapping phones, should be par for the course.
