Everyone Deserves Happiness and Love

A few weeks ago, we painted the town rainbow. The combination of colours that stands for gay pride, was painted across the cities that Urban Company is in. Namely Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. While most of the painting was done as part of our office walls, there were some cities that gave us a space to voice our support. Support for the LGBT movement, support for everybody’s right to love.

The rainbow flag was popularised as a symbol for the LGBT community a far back as the year 1978. The flag that represents respect, solidarity and courage in many cultures across the world, is now synonymous to the LGBT pride. Aside from the obvious symbolism of a mixed LGBT community, the colors were designed to symbolize: life (red), healing (orange), sunlight (yellow), nature (green), harmony (blue), and spirit (purple/violet). The colors that were removed stood for sexuality (pink) and art/magic (turquoise).

Over the years we have seen many pride walks across the world. Gurgaon just had its first last weekend. We have also seen many change their profile pictures on social networking sites to express their support for the movement and revel in its small victories. While the movement has significantly picked up, I still say it is small for the mere fact that Section 377 still exists in India. The basic human right (and emotion) is deemed illegal in our country.

So what do people think of section 377, we asked a few people who were a part of the pride walk in Gurgaon.

Rehan Arora said, “I am a heterosexual, but I really wish I was gay just to piss some people off. How can anyone have the right to tell anybody who to love and how to love?”

Akanksha Varshney says, “I attend the parade every year. This is the first for Gurgaon, and I am glad it finally happened.”

Ayesha Enayat, someone who came out a couple of years back shares her story, “When section 377 was protested against, I felt finally someone has the empathy to realise how wrong this law is. These parades, the changing colours of profile pictures and the fluttering flags are great. But what I truly wish for is a day, when there would not be any need of any of this.”

Check out our video to support the LGBT movement by clicking here.

When Urban Company decided to offer to shoot gay couples with the best photographers on the platform, little did we know that we will feel overwhelmed with those who joined us in our support. Prominent portals promoted our video, eminent publications wrote about our effort and the need for more and most importantly people came out to have us showcase their love. Bangalore couple Vaibhav and Sukanth tell us why they shared their love story with us, “We saw an ad on Facebook and thought why not? For Sukanth it was more exciting because he is a photographer and being in front of the lens for a change sounded fun!”

Read more about the shoot in a story by Mashable by clicking here

Prominent activist and film maker Pramada Menon who has been active in the queer movement also shared her thoughts on the campaign, “It was a nice & needed campaign. More companies are, and should, come forward to support the movement.” We prod her to share the experience of shooting her own movie and she says, “There are a lot of pre-conceived notions about the LGBT community and assumptions of who you are if you identify outside of the heterosexual framework. The movie engages in a number of these issues and these thoughts through queer lens.”

To accept them is one step, and to understand the community is another. To paint them in stereotypes or heterosexual overtones and not see them for who they are is denying someone a right to exist. Love and Let love, is all we believe in.