Let There Be Joy

I’ve realised that I, too, have been limiting the LGBTQIA+ experience to the realms of pain and trauma. But there’s so much more to being queer — there is all of life...

- Mozez Singh

Pain is universal. All of us know it, feel it and live it. Pain connects humanity and evokes feelings of empathy, compassion, sympathy and love in us, emotions that make our hearts expand, filling it with the rush of a swell.

Consequently, pain also makes us feel grief, pity, shame and sorrow, feelings that can overwhelm or drown us under the enormous sound of their howling. Whatever the source of the pain may be, it makes us feel it always has in its thrall, because pain is so relatable. It is a shared experience. It is a unifier. It is a leveler. It is the truth. And all of the pain is rooted in some kind of trauma. There is not a single living animal or person who has not been touched or assaulted by it. Pain and trauma are the stripes we earn, though some wear them as medals and some as scars.

Some of the best queer stories depicted on Hindi celluloid thus far have been embedded in pain and trauma. There is Deepa Mehta's Fire, a seminal film about forbidden lesbian love and the inferno of its culmination. There is Hansal Mehta's Aligarh, a heart wrenching story about loneliness and shame that crush the life of a brilliant man. There is Onir's My Brother Nikhil which poignantly delineates the stigma of HIV/AIDS and the poisonous sting of being ostracised and cancelled because of it. There is Sonali Bose’s Margarita With A Straw where a queer disabled woman very affectingly attempts to disentangle the complicated meaning of her sexuality, while she also navigates the ever-shifting vagaries of life as a woman living with cerebral palsy. There is Neeraj Ghaywan’s Geeli Puuchi, one of the short films from the