The referenced passage in the veda goes thus:
“O groom - this bride will protect your entire family.”
This little 24 year old girl will protect multitudes of entire families in her totally kickass supersonic jet when she finishes training. That would not happen if Timothy’s advice was applied.
It’s possible to read statistics and repeat recorded knowledge but if you want to really learn about another culture, get yourself into a relationship with a member of that culture. You’ll learn things of remarkable substance you will never read. That’s what I did - in this case, a woman of Desi culture, who, incidentally, through the Indian practice of Gotra could track her ancestry back to Guru Tegh Bahadur, ninth of the ten original gurus of the Sikh religion, who was murdered by the Mughal emperor for refusing to order his followers to convert to Islam. So your opinion of the “mush” you reference does not stand up.
You can research that bit of history, but that’s history. Culture lives in the present day, And in the Indian subcontinent, hundreds of religions - and languages - coexist in an impressive harmony. Because most religions with origins in that part of the world take the view that nothing humans perceive and relate about the Divine is absolute nor comprehensive.
Yet two people can find more similarities than differences when it’s a one-on-one basis, no matter what cultural and genetic backgrounds have come together. We had some big laughs reading a comical “You might be Desi…” article, along the lines of Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck…” Time after time I had to say “OMG - That’s MY family!” -which has diverse roots but nothing from the Indian subcontinent.