As I was burning my cycle tires from HSB 133 to the Himalaya Lawns with banners and posters at around 2:40 pm, I was eaten by the inevitable angst that people might not turn up after all. CLT was empty, and the way to the lawns seemed unpeopled, nothing of the kind that would indicate the start of insti’s first ever Pride Parade in about an hour. I swallowed a heady lump of uncertainty and cycled on to get banners from Bhadra to the Lawns.
The work from the morning and the day before for the parade had me drained and burned out; from the reel-making to the posters, from the team meets and to the logistical work and to all the unexpected calamities that generously presented themselves our way. I hit my hostel for a quick shower. I opened my phone to Whatsapp notification pings bringing in scenes from the lawns, of all these gorgeous young people crowding up in vibrant, beautiful colours before the Himalaya mess. I slid into my clothes and rushed right back, to see all these beaming young people, full of some secret hope and confidence that’s quite rare to see on a Saturday afternoon. Queer folk and allies of the campus, many of them strangers, were greeting each other with their smiles brimming with a communal happiness and excitement of creating something new, something so fulfilling and revolutionary. People were getting their faces painted with rainbows and stripes, donning our “Sam-Made” accessories (special shoutout to Sam for the simply stunning jewellery and the mentorship given to us younglings in making some), and pinning the freshly released Vannam badges dashing with sexy, quirky, queer slogans.Vannam, the institute’s student queer collective, was bringing a new culture of coexistence and solidarity into life.
I write this piece in the solvent company of Chitra Singh:
“Hum ko dushman ke nigahon se na dekha keeje
Pyaar hi pyaar hain hum”
(Do not look at me as a foe,
I am love and all love)
“Hum” could certainly be translated as the I in the royal “We” but it is when it is translated to the collective of “we” or “us” that I find it more fitting. On that day, “we” were all love. A campus plagued by excessive isolation and an anorexic coldness was warming up to the beams of a blanketing rainbow rising from within. Not a congregation along the lines of languages, regions, academic or professional interests, the parade was a human and political celebration of collective action, of coming out and coming together, when one voice, trembling perhaps, finds a lift in an allied decibel from comrades all around – hundreds of them.
We then started our march, loud and proud, as poignant, and occasionally political, slogans of love, solidarity and coexistence arose from around 300 people across the spectrum verging towards the Central Lecture Theatre. Halting at CLT, everyone got together to take pictures; the students, the scholars and the faculty members who also had attended the parade to show support and allyship. After refreshments, the afterparty commenced in HSB 133, where people spoke on open mics, sang songs, read poetry, and danced the night away to end what was, for us, a historic fragment in time – small and personal perhaps in the grand scheme of things, but historic nonetheless. At the end of the day, lying in my bed, I thought of the long chain of things that had to go right for us to pull off a pride parade on campus.
The nights before the parade, the CLT foyer was crowded with bodies crouched over chart papers and banners, hands smeared with paint and faces full with laughter. People were mysteriously spotted with pride flags in NAC elevators for the sake of shooting reels. Dilettantes were seen figuring out video editing in Brahmaputra and the Central Library the night before the video was to come out. Social media users began to receive weirdly funny, unusual and perhaps even borderline annoying reels from Vannam’s Instagram handle. Quark was occupied for two days by frowning faces focused on lining tiny beads into a safety pin needle to create choker links and necklaces and bracelets. The path to the DoST office was worn with grooves left by Vannam members running in and out. The hostel beds of the parade organisers felt a hitherto unobserved weight hanging in at night, and their roommates (or walls, for the single-room bastards) heard deeper sighs being exhaled than the usual ones instigated by academic and insti pressures. It was not one hand smeared with paint, one body dancing in NAC, one set of eyes frowned on the beads, one sigh let out at night or one hand holding the flag, but many. And it is the proud and loud coming together of the many that built the parade. People from all over the campus, many for the first time, participated in a queer event. And there was no fear of violence or hate, only the breath and the voice and the scents of many who believe in love and revolution and freedom for all, mixed and twirled relentlessly in the air that heard them say: “We’re Here, We’re Queer!”
Edited By Garima Sane & Amirtha Varshini V C
Article 19 