Tag: queer

When Hate Is the New Normal

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

The murder of Mad Sandhu has stayed with me.

Not simply because a young, openly gay content creator was shot dead in Amritsar. Not simply because he was someone who had made a place for himself in the public eye by being unapologetically himself. And not simply because he was part of a community that I, too, belong to.

It has stayed with me because it has brought back a question I have been asking myself for some time:

What exactly are we celebrating in India today?

I have seen people repeatedly point to 2018 and say that unprecedented rights were “given” to LGBTQIA+ people by the government. But let us be precise about what happened.

In 2018, the Supreme Court of India decriminalised consensual sex between adults of the same sex by striking down the application of Section 377 to such relationships.

That was not a government bestowing a special favour upon gay people.

It was the judiciary recognising that gay people are human beings and that our fundamental rights cannot depend upon the sexual orientation of the majority.

And frankly, I struggle with the idea that this should be presented as some extraordinary achievement.

Being told that I am no longer a criminal for loving another consenting adult is not a privilege.

It is a basic human right.

It was a colonial criminalisation that should never have existed in the first place.

And decriminalisation is only the beginning.

I can have sex with another man without being a criminal. Wonderful.

But can my partner and I marry under Indian law?

No.

Can our relationship automatically provide us with the legal protections, inheritance rights, medical decision-making rights, pension rights and family rights that heterosexual married couples take for granted?

No.

Is there a comprehensive civil-union framework that recognises our relationships?

No.

Can a queer couple simply adopt jointly as a couple in the same way a married heterosexual couple can?

No.

The law has, in effect, told us:

You are not criminals. But neither are you fully recognised as families.

That distinction matters.

Because discrimination does not disappear merely because the criminal code stops punishing you.

And while we debate these questions in comfortable rooms and on social media, people continue to live with the consequences of hatred.

Mad Sandhu was openly gay. He was a public figure. He created content around LGBTQIA+ issues and had experienced homophobic abuse online. He was shot dead in Amritsar on 3 October.

At this point, we do not know whether his murder was legally a hate crime. The police investigation is ongoing, and there are several angles being examined, including previous tensions surrounding his social-media content.

But that uncertainty should not make us blind to the larger question.

Why should anyone have to wonder whether being visibly queer makes them a target?

I am a gay man.

I am also a content creator.

I have been creating content publicly for years. I know what it means to put a part of yourself on the internet and invite strangers into your life. I know what it means to be visible.

And perhaps that is why Mad Sandhu’s death feels particularly disturbing to me.

My grandmother’s surname was Sandhu. I come from a Sikh family on my father’s side and a Parsi family on my mother’s side. I have never really followed religion in the conventional sense. I have spent years reading about religion, questioning it, trying to understand it and trying to understand what it means to be a human being in a world in which people are willing to kill one another over competing ideas of God.

And one thing I have noticed repeatedly is that the most beautiful parts of religions are remarkably similar.

Love.

Compassion.

Charity.

Non-violence.

Human dignity.

Brotherhood.

The recognition that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

Yet somehow, so much of our public discourse has become the exact opposite.

We are encouraged to identify the person who is different from us.

The Muslim.

The Hindu.

The Sikh.

The Christian.

The queer person.

The woman who refuses to behave as society expects her to.

The person who speaks a different language.

The person whose politics are different from ours.

And once we have identified the “other”, we are encouraged to hate them.

I recently had a conversation with someone at my gym who seemed to believe that the only legitimate response to the problems created by Islamist extremism is to talk about Muslims, jihadis and the violence committed in the name of Islam.

I understand the anger at terrorism.

I condemn terrorism.

I condemn religious extremism.

I condemn the murder of innocent people regardless of who commits it or what God they claim to be acting for.

But I cannot accept the idea that violence becomes more acceptable because it is committed by someone whose religion, politics or identity I happen to agree with.

Violence is violence.

A murdered gay man does not become less worthy of justice because someone else can produce a list of crimes committed by Muslims.

A murdered Muslim does not become less worthy of justice because someone can produce a list of crimes committed by Hindus.

A raped woman does not become less worthy of justice because the accused belongs to a political party we support.

And a tree being cut down does not become less tragic because the project creating the destruction promises economic growth.

This is where I find our current discourse so deeply disturbing.

We have begun to confuse political loyalty with morality.

We are told to celebrate economic development, industrialisation and national power. But what happens when development destroys forests? What happens when rivers and groundwater are poisoned? What happens when habitats disappear? What happens when the air becomes unbreathable and the natural resources that sustain us become commodities?

What exactly have we gained then?

Money?

Infrastructure?

A bigger economy?

And what have we lost?

Clean air.

Clean water.

Forests.

Animals.

Biodiversity.

Beauty.

Perhaps most importantly, our sense of responsibility towards one another.

I also cannot accept the argument that because a government has done some things that I might agree with, I must therefore overlook everything else.

That is not how democracy is supposed to work.

A government is not a parent.

A political party is not a religion.

A prime minister is not a king.

And citizenship is not supposed to require gratitude.

We are supposed to question those who govern us.

We are supposed to demand accountability.

We are supposed to protect institutions.

We are supposed to defend the rights of minorities even when we are not members of those minorities ourselves.

And we are supposed to be able to say, “I support this policy, but I oppose that one.”

That is not betrayal.

That is democracy.

We are currently witnessing protests over allegations of electoral manipulation and voter suppression, including anger over changes to electoral rolls and demands for accountability from the Election Commission. These allegations must be investigated properly rather than simply accepted or dismissed according to our political loyalties.

Because democracy is not merely the act of voting.

Democracy is the belief that my vote matters.

That your vote matters.

That the person whose politics I despise has exactly the same right to participate in the democratic process as I do.

Without that principle, elections become theatre.

And that is dangerous for every one of us.

We have also seen the disturbing spectacle of convicted criminals occupying positions of political influence, as well as governments granting remission to convicted criminals in extraordinarily controversial circumstances. In the Bilkis Bano case, eleven men convicted of gang rape and murder were released early by the Gujarat government in 2022 before the Supreme Court overturned the remission and ordered them back to prison.

That episode should have forced all of us to ask an uncomfortable question:

Do we actually believe in justice, or do we believe in justice only when it happens to people we dislike?

I ask myself the same question.

Because I don’t want a country in which justice is determined by religion.

I don’t want a country in which justice is determined by political affiliation.

I don’t want a country in which justice is determined by sexuality.

I don’t want a country in which justice is determined by gender.

I don’t want a country in which justice is determined by caste, wealth or social status.

I want a country in which a human being’s humanity is enough.

And this is where my understanding of Hinduism also differs profoundly from the political version of Hinduism that is increasingly presented to us.

I am not Hindu, and I don’t claim to speak for Hinduism.

But I have read enough about India’s religious traditions to know that Hindu thought is extraordinarily diverse, internally argumentative and philosophically expansive. It contains traditions that have contemplated plurality, coexistence, questioning, debate and the possibility of approaching the divine in different ways.

I do not recognise the idea that Hinduism needs to become a rigid political identity defined primarily by whom we oppose.

Nor do I accept the remaking of Hindu thought into a narrow, exclusionary framework simply because that makes for effective political mobilisation.

Religion can be beautiful.

But the moment religion becomes an excuse for deciding that another human being is inherently inferior, something has gone terribly wrong.

And this isn’t really about Hinduism.

It is about us.

What kind of people are we becoming?

Because somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten that there is a difference between being right and being humane.

You can win an argument and still be cruel.

You can defeat your political opponent and still be unjust.

You can prove that another religion has extremists and still be a bigot.

You can condemn Islamist terrorism and still be incapable of condemning Hindu extremism.

You can celebrate the decriminalisation of homosexuality and still fail to fight for queer families.

You can call yourself progressive and still participate in misogyny.

You can call yourself religious and still behave in a manner completely opposed to the compassion your religion teaches.

And you can call yourself patriotic while destroying the very land, water, animals and people that make up the country you claim to love.

Mad Sandhu’s death has brought all of this back to the surface for me.

Because it is very easy to say, “This doesn’t affect me.”

Until it does.

It is easy to ignore homophobia when the victim is someone else.

It is easy to ignore religious hatred when the victim worships a different God.

It is easy to ignore misogyny when the woman being silenced is not someone you know.

It is easy to ignore environmental destruction when the tree being cut down isn’t outside your home.

It is easy to ignore attacks on democratic institutions when you believe your own political side will benefit.

Until one day, the hatred reaches your doorstep.

And then it is too late to wonder why nobody spoke.

So perhaps that is the question we should be asking ourselves now.

Not:

“What has this government given us?”

But:

“What kind of country are we building?”

A country where a gay man can be murdered for being visible?

A country where minorities are taught to fear majorities and majorities are taught to fear minorities?

A country where political loyalty is more important than truth?

A country where forests are expendable and rivers are commodities?

A country where women have to protest to be heard?

A country where democratic institutions are questioned but accountability is treated as political warfare?

Or a country where we finally understand that rights are not gifts handed down by governments.

They belong to us because we are human.

The right to love.

The right to live without fear.

The right to worship — or not worship.

The right to disagree.

The right to vote.

The right to dignity.

The right to exist.

These are not achievements that a government should expect gratitude for.

They are the minimum conditions of a humane society.

And perhaps Mad Sandhu’s death should make us stop and ask ourselves, before the next person is killed, silenced, raped, displaced, imprisoned, persecuted or simply forgotten:

What are we waiting for?

How much hatred do we need to witness?

How much blood do we need to see?

How close does violence need to come to our own front door before we decide that something has gone terribly wrong?

Because by then, it may already be too late.

Confused, frustrated, angry

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

It began with a sentence that stayed with me long after it was spoken. When I said it had been a month since we had made love, the partner I most desire looked at me and said, almost casually, that I was angry all the time. It wasn’t the first time. Over time, the language had been shifting. I was controlling. I was a perfectionist. Now, apparently, I was angry.

Maybe I am.

But I have begun to wonder if what he calls anger is actually frustration — the kind that comes from being starved of touch while being told you are difficult for wanting it. The kind that builds when you ask, quietly at first, to be held, to be wanted, to be made love to, and the asking itself becomes evidence against you. When longing is recast as a character flaw, something inside you hardens just enough to survive.

I don’t want constant sex. I want closeness. I want to be held at night. I want to feel a body reach for me without having to negotiate for it. I want desire to feel like an offering, not a concession. When those things don’t happen, when tenderness dries up and erotic attention becomes sporadic or withheld, the ache doesn’t disappear. It finds other outlets. I scroll, I watch porn, I masturbate daily — not because I am insatiable, but because something in me is trying to self-soothe what is not being met. And sometimes, lying there afterwards, I find myself asking the question I’m afraid to say out loud: if there are two men in my life, why do I still feel so alone?

In queer spaces, we are often encouraged to name ourselves early and clearly. To know whether we are tops or bottoms or sides, as if desire can be neatly categorised and remain stable across decades. I have moved between these words for years, trying to see which one fits. When I was a teen, I thought I was a bottom because surrender felt right in theory. Then, after I topped and tied bottoming, I didn’t like either experience. So, I thought I was a side because penetration was never central to my wanting. Then, with my last partner, there were moments when I surprised myself entirely, enjoying things I had once assumed were not for me. None of it followed a straight line. None of it stayed consistent. What I once mistook for confusion, I now recognise as responsiveness — to safety, to trust, to care, to timing.

What we rarely acknowledge is how deeply fear shapes desire. How avoidance can masquerade as preference. How wanting closeness without certain acts doesn’t make you less sexual, only more specific. And yet, there is pressure to present a stable, legible version of ourselves — one that partners can rely on, even if our own bodies are quietly asking for something different.

Alongside this uncertainty about sex lives something even more tender. I love being held. I love sleeping with an arm around me, the reassurance of touch in the dark. And yet, the partner I am most sexually drawn to is not the one who holds me at night. That care comes from my older partner, now, the one who steadies my day-to-day life. I sleep between them. Care on one side. Desire on the other. Somewhere in that arrangement, I began adjusting myself instead of asking to be met fully.

Over time, I taught myself how not to want. I stayed awake until exhaustion took over so I wouldn’t lie there missing what wasn’t coming. It’s a quiet grief, learning to dull a need because it feels inconvenient or unwelcome. From the outside, it might look like composure. On the inside, it feels like erasure.

When I confide in men outside this life, they sometimes say things that sound like promises. That they would never let me go untouched. That they would always hold me. I don’t dismiss them, but I don’t cling either. I’ve lived long enough to know how time works. How novelty softens. How desire changes. How even sincerity is no guarantee. So I accept the recognition, if not the reassurance.

All of this leaves me questioning structures I once took for granted. Whether committed relationships are meant to carry everything forever — desire, care, novelty, safety, touch — or whether that expectation itself is what exhausts us. Whether open relationships should be less of a scandal in queer lives and more of an honest response to how desire actually behaves. Whether love and sex are always meant to live in the same body, or whether insisting that they must is an unnecessary cruelty.

I don’t have answers. What I have is a growing refusal to be reduced — to a role, to a label, to an accusation of anger when what I am really expressing is hunger. Hunger for closeness. For tenderness. For being chosen without having to justify the wanting.

If any of this feels familiar, you are not alone. Many of us are renegotiating love quietly, in the middle of the night, teaching ourselves how to sleep, how to wait, how to endure without hardening. Confusion is not failure. It is what happens when we stop performing certainty and start telling the truth.

Sometimes, that is where living actually begins — not in neat resolutions, but in allowing ourselves to feel the full weight of what we want, and refusing to disappear just because it makes others uncomfortable.

Sabar Bonde

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I watched Sabar Bonda at its 4:20 show at PVR Andheri — an experience that turned out to be more than just cinema, but a mirror. What most gay men go through, irrespective of class. A simple thing like a parent being worried about the future of his gay son. 

It began with death. A father passes away, and rituals immediately take over: what to wear, what to eat, how to mourn, what to suppress. That opening sequence pierced me deeply because my bua — whose birthday coincidentally fell on the day of my viewing — was like a father to me. The grief, the weight of conduct, and the demands of tradition all struck a profoundly personal chord.

What makes Sabar Bonda so powerful is that the protest it mounts is whisper-quiet. It doesn’t erupt in melodrama; it lingers in what society insists upon — in colour, rules, and ritual. A grey shirt Anand is told to change. Much like how people ask us to change, to convert. The slippers he wears – bringing comfort to his feet – but only in the company of his lover, because ritual forbids it. The shadows of who he is, pressed against the mould of what he’s “supposed” to be. The film reveals itself in the texture of small moments: Balya’s gift of cactus pears, the shared silences, the tension between city and village, heartbreak and love, grief and continuity.

Anand’s mother is the film’s moral and emotional backbone. She loves, supports, and resists in her own way. His father’s eventual acceptance, Balya’s steady care, and the hesitancy threaded through each character are rendered human. There is no villain here — only systems and traditions, and people trying to navigate them quietly.

Critics have largely echoed these impressions. Moneycontrol calls it “a gentle story of grief, memory, and love told with quiet honesty. It lingers in the silences and small moments …” Times of India writes: “to enjoy the sweet taste of cactus pears, you must first carefully remove the sharp spines from the skin of the fruit … meant to be savoured exactly like that.” That metaphor mirrors the story’s truth — love, identity, and acceptance are like a fruit you crave, but you must first tend to the pain. Indian Express highlights the film’s visual poetics: the still camera, wide frames, and static gaze that holds ritual, grief, and distance until intimacy seeps in. Hindustan Times calls it “a tender, deeply moving study of queer love in one of the year’s best films,” noting how customs, everyday pressures, and quiet longing are handled with exquisite precision.

Where my own experience diverges is in how deeply the symbols resonated. The cactus pear, unlike the peach in Call Me By Your Name, isn’t about erotic awareness, but about care, concern, and tenderness — love that is rare, difficult to find, but sustaining. The rituals aren’t simply a backdrop; they are choreography, dictating what must and must not be done. Anand’s protest is not loud — it is embodied in small refusals, in gifts, in a silent embrace.

Long after leaving the theatre, certain truths lingered. Rituals and rules aren’t just external constraints; they are the inner architecture Anand must resist and reshape. The sensory texture — touch, clothing, light, the sound of goats, footsteps, and fields — builds an emotional world as vivid as any dialogue. There is the courage of saying no to what one is “meant” to be, and yes to a hidden version of self. And there is the way family, particularly the mother, becomes both an anchor of tradition and a wellspring of possibility.

Some critics have noted the film’s pace is slow. I felt that too — but its slowness isn’t a flaw. It forces us to sit with grief, longing, and ritual as the characters themselves must. It may not satisfy those expecting dramatic peaks, but its reward is in its lingering — in the way it teaches us to notice what we otherwise overlook.

The caresses are felt through the screen. The running of hands in the hair. The embrace to ward off the cold. The closeness found at last in the privacy of the city. They permeate through the screen and fall into your hands and heart. The emotion there becomes visceral and that’s what makes the movie brilliant – it’s like reading a book, you are pulled into deeper nuance and feeling.

Sabar Bonda doesn’t shout its declarations. It doesn’t need to. Instead, it builds a space where grief, yearning, and identity coexist in fragile balance, where society’s insistence collides with the quiet affirmations of love and humanity. It reminds us that love can be radical, even when soft. That rituals can suffocate as much as they anchor. That resistance doesn’t always roar — sometimes it whispers, gently, persistently, and all the more powerfully.

If I were to give it a frame, I’d say: Sabar Bonda is a film of small revolutions. It doesn’t overthrow. It loosens. And in that loosening lies its beauty — because it allows tenderness the room to breathe.