 Hi, so a bit about myself. So as you know, I am a lawyer, so human rights kind. But I also, with enough alcohol, can be a bit of a philosopher. I write. I like performing on stage. I'm a bit of an actor. I used to think I was a violinist. And I'm a pop culture enthusiast. So I'm a lawyer, writer, actor, fake philosopher, ex-violinist, pop culture geek. And I'm gay. I'm homosexual. I'm the G in LGBT. That's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, for the uninitiated. I wasn't expecting that. So why did I go for that final highlighted punctuation? I mean, shouldn't sexuality be incidental to who I am as a person? Should it? Maybe? Is it? No, not at all. As a friend of mine, Gautam Bhan once put it, there comes a moment in your life, if you're a sexual minority, when you realize that you're different, when we realize that the world isn't exactly designed for people like us. It is a profoundly lonely moment. It's a moment when we started scavenging, when we started hunting for stories. We took the books we read and we changed the gender of the protagonist. We took the movies we read, we saw, and we changed the gender of the hero or heroine. We read between lines. We found spaces between cracks, anything to see that somewhere in someone, somehow there was this mirror to our reality, this companion to our confusion. And did you find something? No, not a lot of the time. Because being gay in India, when you're growing up, it's not really a part of the conversation, is it? The first time I told someone I was gay, it was actually on stage in the middle of a quiz. And I couldn't really bring myself to say the word itself. I mean, it's just one syllable, three letters. And I couldn't say it. I was just so petrified. And she had to finish the sentence for me in the middle of answering a question about Peter Parker's real identity. So yeah. And then a year went by. And wonder of one does, 10 people knew, and it got easier. And then another year went by, and my class knew. And we started this gender and sexuality forum in law school. That is the year when the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality in India. It was a beautiful landmark judgment that gave equal moral citizenship to millions of LGBT people in the country. However, very soon after the judgment was passed, an appeal was filed against it before the Supreme Court of India, more than that. But then another year, and now everyone in my university knew, and we staged this LGBT protest in the country, in the city, sorry, country. And then another year, and then really the biggest thing happened, I told my parents. Told my parents, and I stood with these other lawyers who were arguing before the Supreme Court of India in that appeal regarding the decriminalization of homosexuality. That case has now closed, as it's been reserved for judgment, and we're crossing our fingers, and we're hoping for the best. The journey of coming out for many an LGBT person in the country, the point of coming out doesn't really mark the end of a journey. It marks the beginning of another. And for so many people in this country, that is a profoundly traumatic one. So you have these stories of so many people who were taken to psychiatrists and told that their homosexuality is a mental disorder, that they can be treated, and then they're treated with these inhumane methods, this electroshock therapy. You have so many people who are picked of the streets by police officers, raped, brutalized, tortured in police stations. You have the law that's misused against people who elope from home, and you know, you have cases of false kidnapping filed against them, so they're brought back before their parents, and then you just have these questions, these questions that you're constantly faced with. Now, just a sample of my four favorite ones is homosexuality unnatural. If we allow it, then are we going to allow for bestiality at some point of time in the future? Isn't it true that all homosexuals were sexually abused as children? And finally, isn't homosexuality really this product of westernization? I mean, it's not really a part of Indian culture. The thing that's common with all of these questions, other than the fact that they're rooted in some kind of ignorance or prejudice, is that they all have answers, and we can answer them by speaking up and speaking out and breaking this silence, because the law that criminalized homosexuality in India was passed in silence without debate, without dissent 150 years ago, and that silence has engendered the silence of the LGBT community, and that is the silence that we're trying to break now by speaking about it, by marching in prides, by making sure that sexuality is not known, not incidental to who we are, till we reach a point when it can be, by reaching out to other communities who've also been sidelined, by seeking out that basic human trait empathy, by trying to build these communities of tolerance, because in the end, I think that there's a closet case inside a lot of us. Let me elaborate on that. I think that there's a closet nerd, I think there's a closet prude, a closet intellectual, a closet dreamer, a closet cynic. If you're really lucky, if you're really, really lucky, then you'll be me and find a closeted gay man inside. Yeah, thank you.