Through Love’s Great Power - A Poem by Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth just sent this to the Times of India. It's a poem on the Supreme Court ruling on Section 377, recriminalizing homosexualilty in India.

Through love’s great power to be made whole
In mind and body, heart and soul –
Through freedom to find joy, or be
By dint of joy itself set free
In love and in companionhood:
This is the true and natural good.

To undo justice, and to seek
To quash the rights that guard the weak –
To sneer at love, and wrench apart
The bonds of body, mind and heart
With specious reason and no rhyme:
This is the true unnatural crime.

Vikram Seth

Forward it to those who matter.

http://krishnakumarv.tumblr.com/post/74921327602/through-loves-great-power-through-loves-great

What a disappointment!

On my fifth evening of my visit home for my Mom's minor eye surgery, my father reinforced my mental image about him - as an ill-educated, conservative, uncaring tyrant.

After slyly asking me when I would be returning to Kerala next, he asked me, "I know you have said no previously, but marriage proposals are still coming in. Why don't you get married?"

To this, I said that I'm disappointed at this question and that I thought he had understood what homosexuality is.

He said, "Many people in our family have suffered from this condition?"

I asked him, "What? Homosexuality?"

He said, "Infertility."

I told him, "It's because of people like you that people of alternative sexual orientation commit suicide."

He said, "It will be good for you and solve many of your problems." By problems, he meant depression, which he thinks is caused by loneliness.

I said, "I have my partner now and I'm perfectly satisfied with that."

He had that evil, bull-shitty smile which screamed "You fool!" as a response. What a disappointment of a father!

All throughout this, my Mom was caring and smiling and was agreeing to what I was saying.

She deserves respect. My Dad does not. Period.

Imran Khan's vs. homophobia - thanks to NH7.in

Thanks to Upworthy for this article, and NH7.in and Imran Khan for this project.

Chennai homophobic rally

I just read this post on Orinam.net, which is a bilingual website (Tamil and English) associated with the Chennai-based group for social-support-arts-advocacy called Orinam. Similar to the Change.org petition for retaining Section 377, which has been taken down because of complaints, this is the second evidence of such blatant homophobia/regressive mentality displayed in India.

I'm out to my sister, who lives in Chennai with her family. I can completely relate to her mother-in-law and father-in-law, hardcore, conservative, Hindu Brahmins, teaming up with Christians for just this one purpose.

Sad.

(Sources: Orinam.net, @shrisadasivan, @hiyer)

To be gay in India

Someone started a hashtag on Twitter #ToBeGayinIndia. I don’t quite know what was the motive behind it. I bet it was something negative –something about the hardships that gay/lesbian/transgender people face being out in public in India.

Having been out for about 15 years now, in varying levels of ‘outness’, with the present level being completely out, I think that India (Kerala + Mumbai) is very gay friendly. It’s just that people don’t realize it. That’s the irony in it. People just think that India isn’t all that friendly and they choose to stay in closets of relative sizes.

I have had practically no bad experiences having been gay in India, except for perhaps finding an apartment to live with another man in an apartment (when Vinokur came down in 2008). Other than, touch wood, it’s been a wonderful 15 years of being out in India.

Look at me – I am out in all facets of my life, out on all social networks, have an active blog, and have a very promising gay social life, which unfortunately I don’t participate much in. The only bad thing is that, because of the problem that I mentioned above, I haven’t found a good partner for me from India.

This problem would be solved if people started embracing  themselves instead of blaming the society for not embracing them. As simple as that!

Homophobia in WWE?

I was watching the episode of WWE's Raw (21st February, 2011) on Ten Sports tonight. John Cena was responding to the Rock's monologue during which he made fun of Cena's "You can't see me" catchphrase and his boyish antics. Cena started out well. But I thought he went into a phase where he sounded extremely homophobic. Here's an excerpt of the monologue from Prowrestling.com and other sources.

Cena continues to rap and knocks Rock for wearing makeup and a dress in his movies. Cena says he's like a big purple pinwheel and tells Rock to "blow me." Cena goes on, saying Rock spends his next movie in a bowling alley, polishing Cena's balls. Then he makes a jibe at the Rock: “Don’t go racing to Witch Mountain Rock, because your mountain is Brokeback!”.

Here's a video of the excerpt from YouTube:



Now, I don't consider that the writers and the management staff of WWE are doing great by promoting angles with clear homophobic tendencies. After all, the mass they cater to is the kids and adolescents more than any one else. The only way to justify this is they WWE is plotting Cena to turn a heel soon. In that case, maybe this would be alright.

More links to read:

• http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=121413230346&topic=16137
• http://bleacherreport.com/articles/624351-homophobia-a-serious-issue-plaguing-john-cena-and-the-wwe
  

'Straight' out of nowhere

I was one of the few invitees to the screening of 'Straight' yesterday at Fun Republic preview theatre (Parvati Balagopalan, Vinay Pathak, Anuj Chaudhary are just a few names from the attendees of the screening). I was skeptical because of a lot of reasons - a cynic by my side, a 'gay-friendly' movie from Bollywood on the screen and a theatre full of people whose natural instincts are to scream and holler on instinct at the slightest of jokes and faintest of hints of positive gay-vibe. The 'Dostana' nightmare still lingers on, you see. The first few minutes of the movie added to my wariness as some unexpected and cheap animation tricks to 'charter' down a family tree were unfurled on the screen.

Thankfully, that was just about it. The movie had me forget about all the things that could go wrong. It was fast paced, witty, clever and intelligent. The character development was just at the right pace leaving scope for the plot to become really interesting. It's funny how performances simply become good when you get rid of all the 'stars' and get some real actors into the mix. It is not at all surprising that I'm itching to add an 'unlike Dostana' tag to each and every sentence in this little post. But I'm not a movie-critic and I'm not writing because I needed to feel like one. Let's get to the point here.

This movie is so positive with regards to gays and their rights that it pales everything else that has come before it - 'Fashion', 'Dostana' you name it. There is NO gay stereo-typing. There are no banal jokes about homosexuals. Homophobia was dealt with classy treatment which would make even the homophobes enjoy the movie and possibly change their mindset. There are so many instances in the movie which stress about gays being regular people, about gays being not obsessed with sex and only sex, about arranged marriages destroying lives in the gay-context and finally about gay relationships being simply like any other relationship; with all it's virtues and fallacies.

We have campaigned for 'Milk' and we have cheered for 'Dostana'. I think 'Straight' is the movie that we should really promote as the judgment at the court is around the corner. I applaud the efforts of all the people who were part of the movie! Please go watch it!

The Erstwhile-rs : College mates, friends and the rest

The absolute last day of my visit was spent in meeting up with the rest of 'em who seemed important enough to me vis-a-vis my parents. Is this selfish, one might ask? I feel it is. But then, you have to be selfish to achieve anything in this burdening life and once you have achieved what/whom you wanted, you can be selfless to that/them. Thereby, you get to be even-steven and probably get through to Jew-Parsee heaven.

Jokes apart, I had a quite weird encounter with my medical college batchmates. I had wanted to meet more but I just managed to meet just 4 out of the 200 who had once set forth to be doctors in August 1996. Everyone else was/is busy with their lives working, marrying, copulating, nursing, parenting etc I guess. I got to meet three of my close buddies, all of them surgeons, over dinner that night.

J, the closest and kindest of them all, was as wonderful as he has ever been. Despite being a devout Christian – he would be at the Christian heaven even if it files in for Chapter 7 bankruptcy – he listens to me and tries to understand about homosexuality. He asked me how it was to be in a relationship, the hardships that I faced, the responsibilities that I would face after my eventual adoption/parenting of a child.

He is the only one left back home who I can trust with to deal with my parents. The others like Dee. and the remarkably homophobic catholic Pauletta, are either busy or simply not made-for such a responsible role. We three, discussed stuff ranging from our careers the sudden outcropping of out gay folk from our own batch. Each of them has a kid and I tried to, without much avail, extract information from them as to how it felt like to be a father.

J and I, soon afterwards, went to visit a the still-stunningly-beautiful looking colleague of ours, at her home where my erstwhile Head of the Department (her Dad) was present. It was such an unfortunate situation when we started discussing how my career was more music than Orthopaedics now; the Professor was not even making eye contact with me.

Later on, J came home and met my parents which I thought was an extremely nice gesture from him. But then, I'm used to stuff like that from him. He was the one, after all, who had taken care of my father (and mother) when he had an acute attack of breathlessness (and panic attack respectively) one night a year back when I was here in Mumbai doing my residency.

Apart from them, I met my close friend and erstwhile neighbor and his family. He too has a child in his life – everyone who's anyone, in Kerala at least, seems to have one these days – and we discussed things about my life as a rock-star in Kerala. He had been the one who had sorta challenged me to try and achieve success in music (link). But the most entertaining part of that rendezvous was the wonderful conversation that I had with his father in law, a poet/linguist/teacher, about things as wide ranging as the anatomy of the nervous system and the paintings by his son!

I also happened to coincidentally run into the most wonderful neighbors that I have ever had in my life. It was at the railway station where I had gone to meet someone else where I met them and then eventually went to visit them at their new home in Thiruvananthapuram. I was so happy! Catching up with fun folks is always fun! The absolute icing on this cake was the wonderful Thanjavur paintings that I got to see made my the Mrs. of the house and the wonderful nibbling that I received from a 2 month old Pug pup which was the latest entrant into their household. Believe me, I have never had any thing chew on my Adam's apple or my nasal cartilage - man or animal, ever - and it felt good!

The last little snippet here about the meeting that I had with the father of my friend. He was one of the people who I kinda respect because of the way he treats me – not just as his son's friend, but as a friend or an intelligent person. I was forced to come out to him during the conversation and it was surprising to see the kind of reaction from him, given the background that he was trained medical postgraduate. But that's his generation, not his education which imposes itself on such contexts unlike religion as with the case of Pauletta. That just made me aware of how fortunate that I was with the set of parents that I have.

Why Dostana is a must-miss movie

I don't know if I even qualify to give a critique on Dostana - I couldn't stand it. I walked out of the near deserted theatre yesterday, 5 minutes into the interval. The reason might just be that in the last few months, I've been keeping myself from watching anything but classics from Hollywood apart from those that I watched at the GB film festival and Humsafar highs.

Dostana as a movie is simply bad. I couldn't see anything which was good enough from the movie critic point of view. Bad acting, bad direction, bad screenplay, tepid humor - all ensured that I spent the time that I was in the theatre surfing and checking e-mail. John Abraham's butt was by far the most emotive amongst his body parts and I was reminded of an episode of Will and Grace where Jack plays a butt-double for a famous Hollywood actor during a shower scene.

I actually liked the Boman Irani character - which I thought was a dig at Meryl Streep's role in the Devil Wears Prada. Despite his character being effeminate and rather homo-sexual, he had the guile of an 'actor' to pull it off well. I haven't watched 'Fashion' yet and I presume I would like it better than this.

From the community standpoint, I suppose it was a positive move from Bollywood. In the campy jokes that fly around, I average homo-agnostic or homo-neutral person would become more familiar our presence. The kind of acceptance given by the Ms. Chopra's and her aunt's characters in the movie is refreshing. I was touched personally by the scene in which the character that plays Abhishek's mother has an epiphany about her 'gay' son.

I guess the other half of the movie has maybe another instance of such an instance which could touch an average gay guy who is comfortable with his sexuality and maybe I should have bothered to go through a couple of dozen pages of the Wikipedia at the theatre to pass time until such a scene surfaces.

After reading the positive reviews about the movie from inside the community, I thought this movie could be the one movie which I could coax my Mom and family watch before I come out to them. Now that I have seen at least half of the movie, I would not even dare to let my sister watch it for purposes of homo-acclimatizing - because it simply isn't a good movie.

Hetero-homo-phobia

I was watching the season 3 of Will & Grace on my 'puter the other day and I saw the episode in which Jack unleashes his hetero-homo-phobia. Whaaaa? There is this episode in which Will tries to organize a educational programme against homophobia and discrimination for police men. Through the episode, Jack continuously insults a lesbian couple who volunteer to be themselves in the 'play' that Will writes.

I was amused. Not because of the comedy, but as to why I sort of empathized/related to Jack's views. I'm not saying that I hate lesbians. But I couldn't put my finger on it. Today, I received an e-mail from the GB mailing list which decimated my confusion. It showed a rather lewd picture of a soap dispenser decorated by imagery with someone's hand having the dispensed soap.


How? What? Confused? Well, look I started thinking who could not be amused by this picture. All men, all men who liked men, all women who like men. But not women who like women.

Still don't get it? Penises. Yes, they are not involved in lesbian sex. That's why.