CHERISH with HARISH

NID, A-Hostel. Today, it is 50 years of the LGBT movement. It was July 2009. We had just had our dinner. We used to go to the hostel terrace for our post-dinner discussions. These used to be easy and laid-back. These post discussions used to be like the night breeze. There were no deadlines, no tensions, just the victorious feeling of the breeze entering your hair. There would be no questions , only answers. I used to love this part of the post-dinner conversations. We were a group of 3-4 young men and we had just started getting to know each other, through these discussions. We did not know that these conversations would make us the men we would be after ten years. It was one of those nights, and it seemed everyone was busy in the studios. Not many people had come back. It was just a friend of mine who had come to the terrace for the breeze. We continued talking and out of nowhere, he said that he is gay! I was shocked because I did not know hoe to react. I was straight and

It was a decade old guilt. Every night after my rehearsal at NID's theatre group,'Khel', I used to sit at the institute foyer, with this somewhat senior, Saheb. I liked him in the first few glances, because he would be busy doing his work, which has always been a positive for me. He never acted as if he had lots of work, he seemed to 'enjoy' it. I have always the company of such people. We started conversing and our late night conversations traveled from theatre to arts to ghosts and civilisations. These were interested topics for me and as soon as my rehearsal would get over at 12:30 or 1 at night, I would look for Saheb's company, and we would continue the chat. Our discussions started taking a new tangent and we did not realise about the rural-urban gap in the country or n opportunity for us NIDians to work on it. I got to know that Saheb was a 'Santhal', a tribe in the East of my country. In the mornings, we would just pass a smile or a formal &

Bajju, Februrary 2019 I was in my hut. I had been in this strange thought process that I should go on a lonely voyage, cutting off from the world. I had started enjoying the loneliness too. I was not watching TV for a long time, not in touch with the print media and most importantly, I was not in touch with friends. I had stopped watching movies, as travelling to Bikaner was an affair. I had started enjoying rural travel. But things changed when I analysed my life. All of a sudden, I realised that I was all alone in this world. That was scary. I was talking only to my parents once or twice a day, which I guess was good enough. I realised that I had colleagues at my work-place, but no friends. Suddenly, I was short of friends. All my friends were getting married or busy with their work. It is here that I made friends with nature. I planted a tree right outside my hut. I named it 'PAED' (Hindi/ Urdu for a plant!) I started meditating and started writing my old friend, my

I had breakfast at my brilliant workstation-village, Bajju, Rajasthan... then my lunch at the lovely town of Bikaner...and my dinner at Delhi-NCR. This village to town to city and back to village in such a short span has been opening windows to the fact that people are all the same, everywhere. This space-time trip is what happenened with me this Holi and I am back to where I started... all refreshed! Happy Holi...

Bajju, Rajasthan. 9 pm In Bajju, every morning I wake up for chai and smile at strangers, who break their 'Being strangers' tag with that beautiful smile. In a similar way, there is a 'Good-morning' which breaks the unwanted ice, in the rural area across India . People living in Indian cities don't know this concept of wishing strangers, early morning. Coming from an urban Indian background, I also thought that this is a very western concept. I realised its importance when I spent days travelling with my foreigner friends. It would just be a smile, an acknowledgement to a complete stranger. But my recent shift to rural India made me realise that it is much more common here to smile here than anywhere else. When we look at the bigger picture, we always think that the villages have things to learn from the cities, but now when I look at the micro-level, I realise that the villages are any day more 'advanced' than the so-called 'modern' cities.

9:30 pm, Bajju, Rajasthan. I was feeling trapped in the Delhi clouds. The clouds were of pollution, of confusion and of pressure I was not liking. I had started doing theatre, but somehow I wanted to do something deeper. I had always admired nature, but never experienced it as close as I wanted to. I had always been somewhat a free soul, a free bird, but I guess I was not getting space to fly. It was very sudden, very random, and I packed my bags to Rishikesh. I somehow liked it. I had started enjoying the concept of self-exploration. I was enjoying the process. I came back home to Gurgaon and on the internet I met an old friend online, who was working in the Thar desert. I asked her about the job. She asked me for a weekend's visit. Keeping my fingers crossed, I left to see the work-place. The desert was not a new place for me, but had never been there for a job. I had been called there for a film-maker's post. Adding to this, I would also do a teacher's, a theatre

In search of 'me', I travel the universe, I realise that 'me' is, when I actually see the 'others'