Who am I?

Am I the average Indian man with one part misogyny and 3 parts chaos?

Or the average Indian woman with two parts feminism and two parts equality?

Or perhaps the ‘other’ with two parts denial, one part rejection and one part hope?

The choice of gender in modern times has become a compulsive multiple choice question with only one correct answer.

No, really…WHO am I?

And why am I fighting this ugly war that seeks to demarcate my personality and limit my aspirations?

Every day, every moment…I am being defined and labelled as something that is being used against me the very next day.

What if I am this genderless blob of human flesh that wants to cry but not cook?

What if I am a cross-dresser who doesn’t want to be called gay?

What if I am a trans interested in women or a lesbian lusting after penises?

What if I am none of the letters in LGBTQ, yet I exist somehow …much like you do…. but with no hold over my own person…

WHO AM I?

No, really…you tell me…

Free me of the bondage that I have been put under…

To define myself, to bracket myself within words that put me on either sides of a moral compass…

The right wants me to pick up a sword and fight like a man and the left wants to convince me that women too, can pick up swords to fight and that does not make men any less of a man…and women any more like a man…it makes them an equal…probably…

But I wouldn’t know ’cause I don’t want to pick swords at all..

What if I want to pick up a pen or a brush or a drumstick?

What if these hands, which you taught me were meant to oppress,

Were in fact made to create…

A picture, a poem, a song, a sculpture…

Allow me, will you?

To be defined by what I create than what I was born as or what I was born into…

Let my gender or un-gender be my own choice rather than a burden I choose to carry for the sake of a few …

Allow me, please..to be what I know I am

An Artist. And a 100% only that.