Kashish on campus
If you cannot go to Kashish, well, Kashish will come to you. The International Queer Film Festival, the annual Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) fest, went to IIT-Bombay recently. Kashish Forward, the mobile arm of Kashish, has become India’s first travelling campus queer fest. It held a screening of three films from this year’s Kashish at the institute’s Powai campus, in association with Saathi, IIT Bombay’s campus LGBT group. The films screened were Mitraa by filmmaker Ravi Jadhav, Crush-Shake by Jagruti Jethe and Kyunki… by Avinash Matta.

A loud applause: A standing ovation for Mitraa at IIT’s Bombay campus

“There is nothing like gay cinema and mainstream cinema. The audience wants to see all kinds of stories. They will come to watch a good film. We only need to market it correctly,” said Ravi Jadhav. Aditya Joshi, an IIT student, and one of the organisers of Saathi, added, “It was heartening to see a full house. Many in the audience were non-queer members of the IITB campus who had come to understand queer people.”