Bangalore's Pride!

Gay Parade’s are like ‘Mass’ Telugu films – they are filled with fun, frolic and freedom, they are as colourful as a prism working overtime, they are loud and proud and even if they might not culminate in all the loose ends being tied up they sure do promise to always end with that much anticipated bang!
Our Bangalore’s very own gay pride parade sure was the much loved Bang that the city has boasted so often about. What started off as a very political-looking rally soon went through a very interesting metamorphosis and was soon the loudest and most colourful rally the city has ever seen! Be it our aravaani sisters who mocked the article 377 through their tongue-in-cheek slogans that resounded through the streets or the hundred plus straight men and women who willingly joined the rally at different parts en route as they encountered it.
This was the face of minority Bangalore and the most-obvious and encouraging fact was the diasporic population that chose to participate. The rally cut across the class barrier that is otherwise the most obvious division in the city and brought together an otherwise extremely heterogeneous population under some impenetrable yet encouraging sense of homogeneity. We had every minority represented including the transgendered, the bisexual and even the bi-curious population. While slogans demanding the equality of all peoples filled the streets, smaller more subtle banners like ‘pyaar kiya to darna kya’, got the message quite satisfactorily across to anyone who cared to listen.And like that wasn’t good enough, the rally finally culminated at the Town Hall, in a dance frenzy that spelt the word F-R-E-E-D-O-M. While the spirit of dance engulfed almost everyone, and the drum got most hearts beating faster, there was a sudden sense of pride and hope that swept across the crowd. A pride of being who you are, and where we were. A pride of being different, yet so essentially similar. A pride of being gay, lesbian, transsexual, transgendered, bisexual, bi-curious and more than anything else – of being Bangalorean. We love the city, for accepting everyone for who they are, and even though freedom both legally and culturally is far away, the fact that we’ve made that first step and have been supported, is enough for now!