‘Coming Out Day’

On 1st November, the ISR committee organized a webinar on the LGBTQIA+ Community Coming Out Day with Sandipan Kushary, a Queer Activist and Mobbera Foundation president, and Akkaldev Anamika Yadav, a Research Student. Anamika ma’am shared how difficult it was for her to come to a religious Indian family who viewed her as the family’s black sheep. When finally, she got the courage to tell her mother about sex-change surgery, she laughed and said it was just a phase. Being inspired by trans people being proudly representative and comfortable in their skin on Satyameva Jayate gave her the confidence to express who she was. Ma’am later advises that while coming out, make sure you are independent, come out to yourself first, ignore the haters. Something while coming out, you need to consider the future how you will retain yourself. Society needs to make sure that they are gentle and provide equal opportunities to LGBTQ+ people.

Sandipan Kushary took the platform to share his story about how belonging to Jharkhand people never really understood the complete umbrella of the LGBTQIA+ community. He elaborates how in his 2nd year of engineering; he attended a session on LGBTQIA+ and started to learn about the community. He mentioned how he made his best effort to unite the entire queer community by making what’s app group, playing games, and arranging knowledge sessions. He then proceeded how an interview made everyone aware that he was a part of the queer community, his family group started sharing his interview clips. After the incident he had a round table conference with his parents and friends where he finally came out. Remembering how he lost a few of his friends when he came out, he said, if people around you are not comfortable, it is okay to let those people go. During the Q/A session, when the speakers were asked how important it is, they said, first come out to yourself. Own your true self, then come out to people. The webinar came to an end with Anamika ma’am signing a beautiful song.