The City of Joy celebrated the Kolkata Pride Month recently with a gala month-long celebration. Apart from getting the city roads, cafes and various cultural centres decked out in rainbow-coloured flags to promote visibility, different queer collectives and organisations of Calcutta and kolkatapride.org organised a host of events throughout the month-long celebration. Collating the different events, kolkatapride.org also released a calendar featuring them. Starting with the Dialogues Calcutta International Film Festival, Pride Month Fundraiser party and Trans & Queer Health Camp, the calendar featured events like Trans and Queer Sports and Parents meet, Gender Mela, poster-making and sloganeering workshop, Pink Pride Ball fundraiser party and the biggest and final event of the month, the Kolkata Rainbow Pride Walk.
The Kolkata Rainbow Pride Walk, the last event on the calendar, was a spectacular walk that took place from Park Circus to the end of Park Street. The stretch was decorated with rainbow flags and rainbowcoloured pedestrian crossings as over 10,000 members of the LGBTQIA community walked the streets, celebrating their identity and choices
Gender Mela was held at Jadavpur University’s Vivekananda Hall. Mostly focussed on the student community, many stalls were also put up by the LGBTQIA people belonging to the grassroots. The event hosted by Kolkata Anandam for Equality and Justice displayed handicraft products made by the underprivileged. Panel discussions were also part of this event
School children and people of different age groups participated in the poster-making and sloganeering workshop, to gear up for the biggest event of the month-long calendar — the Pride Walk
The posters made at the postermaking workshop were displayed during the Pride Walk.
The second fundraiser party of the month, the Pink Pride Ball, was held at The Lalit Great Eastern with an interesting lineup of entertaining performances by dancers, singers, drag artistes and DJs. The lineup included Divvya Eshwaran’s dance performance, Bidisha Mohanta’s singing performance, trans belly dancer Arna, Jhon’s dance, drag artistes Dame Imphala, Betra and Aavya; dancer Bhaskar and DJs Nekid and Markus.
MOODS AND MOMENTS CAPTURED AT THE WALK
“Pride Walk along with the whole of Pride Month events has been an all-encompassing experience for this city and the LGBTQI community and their allies. It was the first ever for this city to get permission for any kind of Pride walk on Park Street — our pride of Calcutta. It was also a first to see our Kolkata Pride flags along with International Pride flags hanging all across Park Street for two weeks. It symbolised our city’s inclusive attitude towards all minorities when in the rest of the country all the major Pride walks struggled to get permissions and few stood cancelled. Our sincere thanks go out to the Kolkata Police, Kolkata Municipal Corporation and various administrators who came forward. Walking proudly in front of Trincas with Akash bhora surjo tara playing was truly a moving and humbling experience with a crowd of 12,000 following through on this special day,” said Navonil Das, a member of Kolkata Pride.
