Indian-born Toronto-based alternative rocker Vivek Shraya is in Mumbai for a reading of his just launched book, God Loves Hair. Navigating sexuality, gender, racial politics, religion, he talks about coming out not just as queer, but also as Indian
God Loves Hair is a collection of 20 short stories following a tender, intellectual, and curious child. Author Vivek Shraya tells us how the book wrote itself and about coming out as queer Indian in a freewheeling interview. Excerpts:



First of all, congratulations on a delightful little book. A lot of it resonates very strongly with what queer people encounter growing up in India. How did it come about?
It wasn't a conscious step. I never set out to write 'a' book. Certainly not this book. I was taking a step back from music, but still needed to be creative. Growing up, my mom always said 'an idle mind is a devil's workshop', and this can be very true in my case. I had often joked with friends about the various occurrences in my life that may or may not have led me to being queer i.e. being mistaken for a girl for the first two years of my life etc. So, I began writing these stories. The project eventually grew into something larger.

Why were you taking a step back from music? You were poised to be the next big thing. This isn't usually a career move expected of the average stage-managed pop star.
Well, I was running into some barriers with my then-label. The business side of art can, at times, take the fun out of the creative side. I didn't want to be writing songs or performing. Being queer is part of who I am and part of who I am as an artiste. But that in itself wasn't the intention of the book. For me, in a strange way, the bigger 'coming out'u00a0 wasn't the queerness but the Indian-ness. Unfortunately, when you are of a different background, people want to exoticise you, and assume your music is 'world music', and your producers want to put tablas on everything, which is not really what I do. That said, I am very proud of my background.