India, Aug. 24 -- She had boarded coach B3 at Indore to travel home for Rakshabandhan. When the Indore-Bilaspur Narmada Express chugged into Katni station on August 7, her family was waiting on the platform but she did not alight. The disappearance of a 29-year-old woman, a law graduate with dreams of becoming a civil judge, was a mystery. Had she been trafficked? Or had she somehow fallen off the train? Nobody could say. Tracing her movements through CCTV footage and eyewitness testimony, Madhya Pradesh police tracked her down two weeks later to Lakhimpur Kheri on the Nepal border. Astonishingly, she had engineered her own disappearance, the police said. "She wanted to become a judge while her family wanted her to leave her studies, her ambitions and get married." Archana Tiwari had made a life of her own living in a hostel in Indore as she practised in the high court and prepared for the judicial services exams. The future she saw for herself did not include giving up her career after marriage to a family-approved man. Archana has not yet issued a statement. We only have the police version. Yet, you have to ask: What would drive a 29-year-old lawyer to plot and execute her own disappearance from her family? How desperate does she have to be? Modern India is seeing a generational clash of aspiration with tradition where educated women are pushing to exercise autonomy in matters of career and love - in that order. But their parents remain enmeshed in tradition where it remains their primary duty to marry off their daughters to a man they choose for her. It's a tension that is increasingly manifesting itself in tragedy and in crime. In Palanpur, Gujarat, an 18-year-old dreams of getting into medical college. Earlier this month, her father and uncle were arrested for killing her. Tennis player Radhika Yadav's professional success was too much for her father to handle so he allegedly shot her while she was cooking a birthday breakfast for her mother. Across the border in Lahore, a 24-year-old woman was shot dead by her younger brother because he couldn't stomach the fact that she was in love with a fellow doctor. Women continue to bear the burden of family honour - not that different from 79 years ago during Partition, when families chose to make their daughters shaheed (martyrs) rather than risk their falling into enemy hands, feminist publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia told me in a recent interview. The imperative to control daughters in the name of protecting them seeps through society. We see it in the judiciary - who can forget that the Kerala high court said a 23-year-old Hadia was too feeble to choose her partner? We see it in our laws, with states introducing so-called anti-conversion laws that all but prohibit interfaith marriages. Independent India's first uniform civil code in Uttarakhand requires cohabiting adults to fill out a 16-page form to be submitted to a government official. What is this if not control by a nanny State? Bridging the education gap has been India's great success story. But if education is supposed to free the mind, why do we still insist our daughters remain obedient and unquestioning of parental authority? And yet, the heart knows what it wants. In Uttar Pradesh, last June, as many as 11 married women took the money disbursed to them under the prime minister's Awas Yojna and ran off with their boyfriends. Maybe it is time for parents to consider the radical idea of leaving daughters free to make their own decisions - even if they don't agree....