Voices
I remember my face lighting up when a relative (sarcastically) complimented me for having ‘matured’, and having outgrown the colour…
There is an aesthetic template for the ‘beautiful’ urban Indian woman. She dresses in ‘traditional’ attire, has the right kind…
Believe it or not, I knew I was queer since I was three years old. One of my earliest memories…
Raised within a binary mindset, where everything is supposed to exist in independent blocks rather than a continuum, nothing about…
I am sitting in my class, wondering when the bell will ring. I am moving my legs. My eyes are…
Like any other Indian school, our school, too, didn’t provide any kind of sexuality education to us. They hoped our…
Stop everything! I have a condition that you must follow before you read any further, before you consume what I’ve…
“तेरी बातों में किमाम की ख़ुश्बू है…”-फ़िल्म ‘बंटी और बबली’ (2005) में ‘कजरा रे’ गाने के बोल फ़िल्म ‘लगे रहो,…
“Teri baaton mein kiman ki khusboo hai”(Your words carry the fragrance of kimam.) – From the song ‘Kajra re’ in…
The growing encroachment of the Internet and its subsets into our lives has created a world where we reach out…
Around the age of 22, I made up my mind to make my body smaller. I worked out, imposed food…
The simple truth is that my body and I are having an affair. We each obsess about the other, ask questions and desire each other so much, that it often borders on the shameless. My body is more in love with me, I suspect, than the other way around.
Our bodies become the form and medium through which we present ourselves to the outside world, engage with it, interact with it, perceive it and are perceived by it.
There’s a difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. The above instance was obviously of the latter kind. Humour has a complex but integral relationship with queer genders and sexualities, and it has been evolving over time.
You don’t even realise what you’ve said until someone in the group, quick as lightning, hits you with the rejoinder, “That’s what she said!” As you’re trying to make sense of what just happened, the group dissolves into giggles.