Talking  about Gotra,First, I am sure it has some merit. May be not, but it is a way to keep track of who descended from whom. It is hard to erase, and I don't think it is bullshit.

Second, it is upto you to follow the rules or break it. There are several social rules in the world, and one normally follows them voluntarily. But it is upto you. People are bound to feel awkward, specially your relatives.

To be honest, I have never met a man who married within his gotra. It is that rare. May be others have.

And someone said there are geometrically more people who are likely to be related to you as you go back to your geneology and start tracing your relatives. That is not totally true. Demographer and statistician Franciso Galton once did a pathbreaking study on the families that died out in UK. It seems lots and lots of aristocratic families in UK died out, and so did their sirname. Even with such a glorious throne and all the wealth in the world, Shah bansha is about to die out. Lots of Rana (Shamsher ) died without children. Somehow, people don't survive as much as we seem to think.