Here's a mail I should have written days back, but I'm in Madras busy doing the family thing (ok, to be honest, I'm busy watching past episodes of Will & Grace, why didn't anyone tell me Zee English screens them back to back for hours on Sunday?). I should have written it the day I arrived back here, December 30th which was the second day of the film screenings on the subjects of HIV and sexuality organised by Ramki, for SAATHII, and the Alliance Francaise de Chennai. It was interesting going back to the Alliance. The place was a haven for me when I was growing up in Madras. It was close both to home and college (Loyola), but a lot more interesting than the latter, and the advantage over the former was that there actually seemed to be real live gay people. Not just the students, though there must have been many other closet cases like me back then, but with the professors, who were discreet back then, rather than closeted. I was dying for them to shorten my coming out by making a pass at me, but unfortunately they were too scrupulous or unattracted or both. Still, it was a cool place and it seems to be like that now as well, given the readiness with which the director responded to Ramki's proposal to have publicly announced film screenings on queer subjects. The Alliance may not have changed much (though I think the professors no longer have to be that discreet), but Madras certainly has (yes, I realise its not even Madras any longer, but I'm going to use that name rather than Chennai). When I walked in there was just a sprinkling of people and I thought that would be it. But as the evening went on, and the films started, more and more people came in and when the lights came on at the end, I was amazed to see how packed the hall was. For an explicitly gay film! In Madras! As it happened, December 30th was another and sadder anniversary. Riyad Wadia, India's first openly gay filmmaker died exactly a year ago that day. I have written elsewhere about Riyad so I won't repeat it now, but he was a path breaker when he made the films, an inspiration always in the way he was so out and always so composed and cheerful about it, and when I got to know him later in life, he was a friend. It may not make sense, since it wasn't Riyad's film we were seeing, but when the lights went out and the films started at the Alliance, it felt somehow appropriate to be watching a gay Indian film a year on from that day. The first film that evening wasn't a queer one, but about HIV- positive people in Manipur. It was well made and moving, but I'm not going to dwell on it since I want to focus on the second film that evening, Piku Bhalo Achay or Piku Is Fine, a film by Tirthankar Guha Thakurta, a young medical student and filmmaker from Calcutta. I'm going to give most of the plot here, so this is a SPOILER ALERT. I don't think one should see this film for any surprises, but if you want them, stop reading now. Piku Bhalo Achay is on one level a fairly straightforward coming out film. Piku is a college student in Calcutta, he's gay and closeted, but increasingly wants to come out. One of the things driving him is his attraction for his best friend Neel. Piku is realistic and knows that Neel is probably not gay and won't be able to reciprocate his feelings. But he still wants to tell him and he does. But Neel responds first with awkwardness, then outright hostility and, worse, tells everyone else in college. The film opens in fact with Piku's college 'friends' discussing his coming out and how repulsed they are by it. These are the men, but there are also other scenes with Piku's women friends also talking about it, and while not as repulsed, they mostly don't think its natural. These scenes establish straight off the hostile context that most gay people face. The film then moves to Piku who lives with his mother and sister and has no one he can talk to except, rather charmingly, a coconut tree in their garden which he feels a special bond with since it was planted the day he was born. Piku is feeling increasingly desperate because of the hostility of his so-called friends. And at some point (the film seems to move back and forth in time, so I'm slightly confused about chronology) this has moved beyond just passive hostility. Piku goes on a college expedition with the people he still thinks are friends, but then they start drinking and then suddenly gang up and sexually abuse him. This is the most scene in the film by far, not graphic, but none the less disturbing for all that. Piku is evidently a strong personality, given resilience by his ability to introspect. But the strongest of people do need help at times and Piku certainly does now. And help arrives in the form of Aveek-da, the son of friends of his family who's studying psychology in Delhi and arrives in Calcutta on a project. This project is studying how the queer community copes with the pressures they face from society and in Calcutta he wants to interview people associated with SAATHII, a real NGO dealing with the queer community in Calcutta. He's staying with Piku's family while doing this project and his explanation about it to Piku's sister serves as a means to discuss these queer issues. Piku's sister starts off from the normal, uncomprehending and hostile perspective, but Aveek-da helps change her perspective. Piku doesn't say much, but you can tell he's really listening. Perhaps Aveek-da suspects, explicitly or not, something about Piku because he asks Piku if he'd like to accompany him on his interviews. We see them going to the SAATHII office and interviewing people there, both men and women. These are real people - I just met one of the lesbians, a really nice woman at the Laarzish film festival - and they are talking about their actual experiences, so the film really moves into documentary mode at this point. Piku listens quietly at first, but as he listens to their stories and the problems that people in the community have faced and how they've managed to overcome them, it all becomes too much for him. Listening to people who are out when you are still in the closet can be both liberating, frightening and intensely painful, and Piku clearly feels all this. He suddenly starts coughing, can't stop and really seems to fall ill. Back at home he's resting in his room and Aveek-da comes to check if he's alright and also to say bye, since interviews over, he's returning to Delhi. Piku can't take it any longer. He's too lonely and miserable and now the one person he feels might really understand and support him, in the way his college friends never did, is going away. He finally comes out to Aveek-da, who says he's surprised. He's supportive, of course, but the actual support does seem a bit short in supply. He's still got to return to Delhi and all he can tell Piku, rather helplessly, is to hang in there and he'll be fine. Piku is not much comforted at that point, but he has to accept this and that's pretty much where the film ends. Which might seem like a bleak and depressing ending, except for the coda where Piku admits to us that in the end things did sort of work out. He got on with his life, in time he found his college 'friends' becoming, if not accepting, then less hostile. In any case, they all started drifting apart, the way one does. Some years later Piku bumps into Neel at a busy road crossing. They greet each other a bit awkwardly, particularly Neel. You sense that he has a guilty conscience about what he did to Piku. He isn't a bad guy, just unthinking and weak the way most guys are growing up. As they part, knowing they won't see each other again, he looks at Piku one last time and asks, "Piku, you really are OK, aren't you?" Piku leaves without answering, but as the crowds of Calcutta swallow them both up, you hear him reflecting. In time all things change, people move on with their lives, and Piku too has moved on and become just one more among many other Pikus, all living their lives, fighting their battles, moving on. "If one day you see Neel," he tells the audience, "tell him: Piku Bhalo Achay" Piku is fine. At that screening at the Alliance, the audience responded hugely. No questions, about it, this is a film that really connects and moves people. It's not perfect, there are rough patches and after the film the director, Tirthankar, who had come from Calcutta, courtesy the Alliance, for this screening, apologised for the rough quality of the camerawork. It had all been shot on Handicam he said, this was his first film and all the actors were amateurs. In fact, I didn't really notice any problems with the camerawork. It wasn't fancy, but it was adequate and wasn't intrusive the way that some amateur camerawork, trying to be special, can be. The amateur quality of the actors was more noticeable, mostly in the somewhat stagy quality the film had. Piku's coming out sequence to Neel, for example, seemed more like a two-hander on stage rather than entirely natural. Similarly in the sequences between his friends, it was like they were trying a bit too self-consciously to be crude, macho types. Aveek-da is natural, but his role is a slightly artificial one, part sutradhar, telling us about queer life, part support for Piku dropped from the skies. The film is slightly didactic at times, particularly when telling us how queer people are just like anyone else: one appreciates the sentiments, but it sounds a bit like a sermon at that point. Its also a bit hard pinning down exactly what type of film this is, though this is not a criticism, more an admission on my part of a need to pigeonhole subjects that's particularly lamentable in the context of this film. It feels like a documentary and definitely is in the SAATHII parts, yet talking to Tirthankar afterwards you realise it's not such a straightforward depiction of his coming-out. He plays Piku and it seems to be his family in the film, yet in real- life he has no sister, although that really is his mother. Does her participation indicate a total acceptance of his sexuality? Yes and no, he said, he's out to her, but she's still coming to terms with the consequences, even while having taken part in the film. The problems he had coming out were real, but they took place in school, while his real college friends were supportive to the extent of playing themselves in the film, but acting negatively as they did not in real life. Yet all these complexities of real life, and the criticisms of tone in the film ultimately don't matter very much. At the most basic level, the film works so well when you see it that even the raw edges come to seem convincing. The characters are stagy at times, but so are we in real life, especially when on uncertain ground, as the characters often are. Lacking easy responses, we fall back on the stagy, even filmy styles - it's almost amusing how Bollywood our reactions can be at times! Would Aveek-da have been more immediately supportive in real life? Well, sometimes we really do find ourselves constrained, by circumstances and our own responses. Hearing stories of coming out, I've often felt afterwards I should have been more supportive, but sometimes at that point, there's only that much you can do. The part I found hardest to accept was the ending. Piku has been sexually abused by his friends, he's miserable and lonely and falling to piece. Then he just picks himself up and goes on? Continues meeting the same people who abused him? The horror of the abuse sequence is very real, particularly Piku's helpless, unbelieving and ashamed crying afterwards. How does one just move on from there? Yet thinking about it, I realised that Piku/Tirthankar was right. People often can move on from even the most appalling things, and even while the people who did them are still around them. We hear of those who couldn't, who ran away or who stood up or who committed suicide. Yet how many more people just come to some terms with themselves, and get on with their lives. Recognising this reality is not the same as condoning the abuse, and Piku/Tirthankar does not. He explicitly ties Piku's struggles to the larger struggles of all queer people, who just by managing to get on with leading their lives on their own terms, is the ultimate answer to those who would try and stop them. In the film everyone, except Aveek-da and the people at SAATHII, either believe, or start by believing that it's not good for Piku to be the way he is. His quiet assertion, in title and the ending, is the real defiance and the best answer: Piku is fine. After the screening, Tirthankar took questions, and one got the usual range. Most of the questions were very positive in their approval of the film. He was asked, of course, about what's real, what's not. A lawyer linked up the film to the larger struggle against Section 377. There were the usual bizarre questions, which said more about the questioner. One of the few potentially hostile questions - admittedly delivered very mildly by a man who I was only told afterwards was an evangelical Christian - asked if gay relationships could really be as real as straight ones: the huge and unanimous answer yes! from the many queer people in the audience more than answered that! What really impressed me in all this was the poise and confidence with which Tirthankar answered all these questions. As a medical student, he was particularly able to tackle the questions on the medical aspects of homosexuality, pointing out in passing how poorly this was tackled in most medical courses. Listening to him I felt good it was seeing this film and listening to such an able and articulate filmmaker, exactly a year after Riyad died. This past year has been a rocky one. There have been deaths and setbacks. There was the constant backdrop of deaths from AIDS. There was the Pushkin Chandra murder. There was the dismissal of the 377 petition. There was the vile Girlfriend film, that seemed to dirty everything that came in contact with it. There was the increasing evidence of abuse and organised blackmailing of gay men. This year saw a much greater media coverage of queer issues, and much of this was good and whatever the quality, I believe that this is ultimately beneficial. Yet it does throw up further challenges and pressures, not least within the community. Yet watching Piku Bhalo Achay in Chennai was evidence of so much good that's happening. The problems facing the queer movement are so many, there are problems within it as well and the gains sometimes seem so low, that occasionally we end up undervaluing the movement that we have. Yet friends from other countries, both from struggling movements in the developing world and increasingly complacent ones in the developed world, often tell us they are almost envious of what we have. It's a vigorous and rapidly spreading movement particularly as seen in the youth and the confidence of many of those now coming into it. And I can't think of a better sign of it than a young man in Calcutta, from hardly any particularly privileged background, making a film in Bengali about his coming out. Also for me there was the added satisfaction of seeing it in Madras, the city I grew up in, but the most conservative of large cities, the most reluctant to develop a queer movement and at least part of the reason I left was frustration that it would never happen. But this was a public screening and finally there were many queer people I knew in the audience, through the efforts of groups like Sahodharan, SAATHII, SIAAP and others, and lists like [EMAIL PROTECTED], lgbt- [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] It was a great feeling and I knew that Riyad would have been happy. His legacy of queer filmmaking in India is in good hands with people like Tirthankar. And the queer movement that he helped started is also doing just fine. Vikram ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. 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