Cracking the mirror

I remember the girl who desperately tried to be a man and breaks the mirror which shows breasts hanging from her chest. I remember two girls – childhood friends falling in love with each other as monsoon brings rain to the heated earth. I remember the transgender sex worker who challenges the ‘masculinities’ of all those vagabond jobless men who spend time dissecting others and weighing other people’s ‘normalcy’ while they are afraid of protesting when a woman is assaulted by goons openly in a local train. I remember the schoolboy who points out to all our social prejudices to people who doesn’t confirm heteronormativity or choose not to do so whereas some college students felt homosexuality to be a crime and to be condemned and punished by law. I remember these because I cannot forget. After a long amnesia I have suddenly started remembering. Forgetting is a disease I suffered long; it is still a disease for so many. But we love this disease and enjoy our symptoms providing foreclosures to so-many loose ends of life. Then as it happens that suddenly a body is ripped apart and the inside is exposed – shaken with fear we close our eyes or behave like ostriches facing an impending danger – the danger of loosing our faith. That is why the believers denied having even a single look through Galileo’s telescope. History can give witness to the fact that it takes a long tour for human race to come out of that faith. But thanks to Sappho for Equality and Pratyay Gender Trust for making such a great effort to let us realize our polyvalent selves and multiple sexualities always set in motion in their LGBT film festival. The sooner it is the better. All the above sequences are from various films shown in this festival. The number of audience and their enthusiasm showed how people have started removing their blindfolds. Max Mueller Bhavan turned out to be an inter-space for people with various sexual preferences and gender identities trying to know, understand and stand by each other. Unlike other animals man can be characterized more by their variety than uniformity, more by their difference than by their sameness. So they can be divided in terms of class, creed, language, religion, nationhood, ethnicity, gender, sexualities et al. Understanding these varieties enables us to understand ourselves. So after the festival was over the mirror cracked into pieces as I stood in front of it trying to rebuild it from the scattered pieces. Some pieces are lost and when I rebuild the image faces peep through those gaps – remembrance of things past and these remembrances help me to forget. Yes! In order to remember it is necessary to sacrifice certain faiths, certain closers –certain positions of apparent security. The journey begins!