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Business News›News›Politics and Nation›View: Article 377 anniversary is a chance to
celebrate the happy gay stories
View: Article 377 anniversary is a chance to celebrate the happy gay stories
SECTIONSView: Article 377 anniversary is a chance to celebrate the happy gay
storiesBy Sandip Roy, TNNLast Updated: Sep 06, 2020, 10:24 AM IST
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Synopsis
On the second anniversary of the fall of Section 377, especially in a year as bleak
as this, it feels all the more important to hold on to these stories of hope.

A few years ago at the Times Lit Fest in Mumbai, I was asked on stage, “When will
we have the happy gay story?” I was there talking about my own novel, Don’t Let Him
Know, where one of the characters is a gay man who hides his sexuality and gets
married to a woman, not exactly a “happy gay story”.
I don’t remember what I mumbled in response but the question stayed with me. The
2018 Supreme Court verdict that decriminalised homosexuality had not yet happened.
But I cannot pretend that the verdict, landmark as it was, ushered in some Rainbow
Ram Rajya. Even today I hear of young men, regulars at gay parties, who get married
and unfriend their gay friends on Facebook overnight. Two school friends from a
suburban town not far from Kolkata, consumed pesticide and killed themselves. They
were close friends, said the family. One wrote the other’s name all over his
journal but no one said the g-word. In the middle of the lockdown, I heard of queer
friends of friends who killed themselves or tried to do so. Even the luckiest among
us bear the scars of not fitting in and they run deep. For many of us chosen
families offered solace that biological families could not, and the pandemic has
torn many apart from those support systems.

Yet it is worth remembering that we’ve come further than many of us ever imagined
we would in our lifetimes. Apurva Asrani, the award-winning editor/writer of films
like Aligarh, recently tweeted about the joy of buying a home together with his
partner. Not so long ago they had to pretend to be cousins to rent in a city like
Mumbai where landlords only wanted “family” types. Even their parents had to play
along in this charade.

Asrani says he was amazed by all the support he got for that innocuous new home
tweet, even from those whose political ideology was at odds with his. The fact is
when people think of heterosexual lives they imagine family vacations, the first
home, Diwali shopping. When they think of homosexual lives people think about sex,
not two men’s names together on a nameplate. Gay families tend to be invisible. Not
that sex isn’t important, but it’s not the sum total of any life.

The Section 377 verdict finally gave us the chance to celebrate queer lives beyond
the stereotypes of the mincing comic, the angst-ridden victim, the wistful lover
pining in silence. We’ve come a long way from the faux-gay jokes of Dostana to the
family rom-com Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan and the wedding-planner in Made in
Heaven, a man who is unapologetically gay yet not defined by his sexuality. The
verdict also freed companies who wanted to do right by their LGBTQ employees but
felt circumscribed by Section 377 being the law of the land. Parmesh Shahani, the
author of Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Workplace, told me once that while
traumatic LGBTQ experiences in the workplace are all too common, there were also
stories of “hope and possibility” like the parents who come to an LGBTQ job fair to
check out whether a company is queer-friendly enough or the company that does not
just hire transgenders but also tries to find them housing because many landlords
won’t rent to them.

On the second anniversary of the fall of Section 377, especially in a year as bleak
as this, it feels all the more important to hold on to these stories of hope.
India, in some ways, has been lucky. As the response to Asrani’s tweet showed, the
377 verdict came as a relief to many opinion-makers, left, right and centre, who
saw criminalisation of homosexuality as an embarrassing throwback that undermined
their own self-image of India as a modern state in a global liberal economy.

The danger is with increased and more assertive gay visibility also comes
homophobia as Mark Gevisser shows in his new book The Pink Line. That has yielded
political dividends in ultra nationalist projects as far afield as Russia and
Uganda, with gay rights becoming a convenient excuse to target the European Union
or the United States for imposing their own “liberal globalised commodity culture”
and values on sovereign nations, pilloried as a new kind of cultural colonialism.
Of course the irony is the anti-gay laws themselves were also the bequest of those
same European states. All this to show that the path from decriminalisation to
acceptance in a post-377 India will not necessarily be easy.
But on this day, the anniversary of a ruling where a Supreme Court judge said
history owed LGBT Indians an apology for the ignominy and ostracism they suffered,
it’s also okay to just pause, breathe and remember that gay stories too deserve
happy endings.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Fake currency, cattle smuggling on rise along Indo-Bangladesh border: BSF
SECTIONSFake currency, cattle smuggling on rise along Indo-Bangladesh border: BSFBy
Bikash Singh, ET BureauLast Updated: Sep 18, 2020, 01:03 AM IST
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Synopsis
UK Nayal, DIG/PRO BSF Meghalaya, said that BSF deployed at Bangladesh Border is
performing its duties with full devotion to stop all illegal activities and Trans
Border Crimes.
Agencies
BSF on Thursday apprehended a Bangladeshi national and seized Rs 96,000 of fake
Indian currency from his possession.
GUWAHATI: Border Security Force (BSF) said that there are reports that Fake Indian
Currency Notes (FICN) and cattle smuggling syndicate is again gearing up and trying
to revive the supply of FICN/cattle for smuggling like pre-lockdown scenario.

UK Nayal, DIG/PRO BSF Meghalaya, said that BSF deployed at Bangladesh Border is
performing its duties with full devotion to stop all illegal activities and Trans
Border Crimes.

He further stated that, before the smuggling takes an alarming shape again, all
stake holders should step forward, co-ordinate and launch special operation with
BSF to stop the menace of trans-border smuggling

Acting on specific tip off, on September 17, 2020 alert BSF troops deployed on
border of Meghalaya nabbed one Bangladeshi National namely Badal @ Ramjan (66 Yrs),
S/o Rashid Mia, R/o BD village –Barik Tilla, PS- Tahirpur, Distt-Sunamganj
(Bangladesh) along with Fake Indian Currency Note (FICN) worth rupees 96000 which
was to be smuggled from Bangladesh to India. Few days ago, BSF troops also
recovered arms and ammunitions in the same area.

In an another instance, BSF troops deployed on West Jaintia Hills apprehended two
Indian national alongwith vehicle loaded with dry pea worth Rupees more than eight
lakhs. All seized items alongwith apprehended over to Meghalaya Police for further
legal action.
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