Queer and Bengali on YouTube
By Pawan Dhall
Anurag Maitrayee tells Pawan Dhall about 'LGBT Online', YouTube’s first Bengali talk show from India on queer issues
Pawan Dhall is a Kolkata-based queer activist, archivist, researcher and writer. He was a founding member of Counsel Club, Kolkata (1993-2002), among India’s earliest queer support groups, and edited its house journal 'Pravartak'. He worked with SAATHII from 2002-14 on universal access to health and social justice. He is now associated with Varta Trust as Founding Trustee. His latest publications include 'Queer Potli: Memories, Imaginations and Re-imaginations of Urban Queer Spaces in India' (Queer Ink, 2019) and 'Out of Line and Offline: Queer Mobilizations in ‘90s Eastern India' (Seagull Books, 2020).
By Pawan Dhall
Anurag Maitrayee tells Pawan Dhall about 'LGBT Online', YouTube’s first Bengali talk show from India on queer issues
By Pawan Dhall, Soma Roy Karmakar
'Varta' brings you the next series of articles under the ‘Queer Kolkata Oral History Project’
By Pawan Dhall
The summers just got that much more intense with some gripping cinema!
By Pawan Dhall
Both photographs in this article were clicked during an event organized on April 18, 2018 by Maitree, a pioneering women’s rights network in West Bengal
By Pawan Dhall
Morning newspapers are all about marvelling with horror at the survival challenges we as a deeply unequal society throw at our girls and women. And then I marvel some more...
By Pawan Dhall
Death doesn’t have to be something morbid. Especially if one considers what Rabindranath Tagore said about death being ‘completion’ and not the ‘end’ of life (or so I remember from...
By Pawan Dhall, Boicha Huidrom
Pawan Dhall and Boicha Huidrom on 'Rainbow Manipur | Inclusive Manipur', an online documentation initiative to advocate for economic inclusion of gender and sexual minorities from grassroots to policy levels
By Pawan Dhall
To pee or not to pee – in a public toilet! Till this day any decision in this regard has sometimes to be taken even before I have left home.
By Pawan Dhall
Pawan Dhall on a story writing venture that will record the impact of eastern India’s queer movements in the 1990s on people’s lives
By Pawan Dhall
Three of the articles in this issue of 'Varta' talk about the continued hardships faced by transgender and intersex people in India. All jab us in the eye at how far...
By Pawan Dhall
A trans* community hearing organized last week in Kolkata captured numerous grievances and complaints of government inaction across West Bengal. Pawan Dhall reports
By Pawan Dhall, Rudra Kishore Mandal
Fortunate is the editor who gets to compensate the lack of inspiration for his 50th editorial with a thank you note!
By Pawan Dhall, Kaustav Manna
Concluding part of Pawan Dhall’s chat with Mainak Ghosh, Associate Professor, Architecture, Jadavpur University on how universal design relates not just to products and built spaces, but also to our...
By Pawan Dhall
The business world in India has an opportunity to adopt a benchmark to prevent discrimination against queer people in the workplace and beyond. Pawan Dhall reports on the launch of...
By Pawan Dhall
A new media acquaintance wondered what the focus of this issue’s editorial would be. He was sure I would write about journalist Gauri Lankesh's murder. Well, he wasn’t wrong.
By Pawan Dhall, Kaustav Manna
Could there be anything more universal than ‘universal design’? Pawan Dhall chats with Mainak Ghosh, who is Associate Professor, Architecture with Jadavpur University, and discovers how it relates not just...