Mumbai ka rainbow month shuru zhala

Hurray! The Mumbai Pride Month has officially begun. Three days and we are already five events down. 

Last Friday, we debuted with the pride month with the queer networking session at India Culture Lab at Godrej One. The panelists came from very interesting backgrounds. Koninika Roy from The Humsafar Trust, who is also the admin of the young LGBT group of The Humsafar Trust, spoke about how it is important to build a youth networking group for LGBTQ persons. 

Sakshi from Gaysifamily.com spoke about the genesis of gaysi from a networking group for queer women to share stories to actually becoming a semi-support group. Gaysi, with its wide readership, receives queries from queer desi women from across the world. Sachin Jain represented GHAR (Gay Housing Assistance Resource). He said he started GHAR with the intention of helping gay persons stay at places that are non discriminatory. 

The most important thing was that this session was moderated by Saniya Shaikh who used to be a shy girl whose voice was hardly audible. She is a true example of what working with an organisation that celebrates its employees could do. She is a college student who works with Godrej’s India Culture Lab. She was the one making most sense in the conversation, even more sense than Parmesh Shahani, her mentor and the head of India Culture Lab, who was also a panelist. She spoke about intersectionality in the simplest words, while Parmesh stuck to his favourite jargons “cross pollination of ideas”. I can dare write this and be sure that Parmesh will not be offended, because the biggest compliment for a mentor is when his mentee gets better than him. No no. I am not trying to create any locha between boss and employee, but seriously, Parmesh, step aside, Saniya has arrived. Tch tch.

There were four other events this week. On Friday, we had a ‘Queer and political’ event where LGBT persons worked at identifying what are the political issues that should be made into a questionniare for survey. 

On January 7, we began the Queer Premier League  — a cricket match between LBT women. In the afternoon there was a variety programme called ‘Anubhav’. Anubhav was more like a college literary fest with a queer tadka. Then we had a talk by Karanvir Singh at Coockoo Club, Bandra, called ‘Release and Resolve’, with special focus on the queer community.

We have so many events and all of them housefull and overflowing. This stands testimony to the fact that we are growing, we are diverse. It tells us that we are trans, bi, queer and homosexuals, but by no means of comparison can we be termed as homogeneous. We dont have one agenda, one political view, one ideology, or one opinion. We have many. And while clashes are expected, and sometimes imperative, but so is love. Aiklaa?