At the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, under a Bombay sky that holds contradiction without collapse, I sat in conversation with Anish Gawande about my memoir (Tell My Mother I Like Boys, 2025). Days later, in Delhi, across from the long, listening shadow of Qutub Minar, we did it again. Two gay men speaking not from the edges of a Pride March but from the centre of a public forum, addressing rooms not designed for us but willing, for that evening, to hold us. There was pride, curiosity, even care. But there was also distance — a civility that listened without fully absorbing. What we represented remained rare. Not routine, not replicated, not yet recognised as ordinary. We were not the system. We were the signal. Anish understands this instinctively, and it shapes how he occupies space. He is not a politician of volume but of calibration. He thinks before he speaks, edits before he offers, and carries into public discourse a discipline that is increasingly rare.…