Celebrating Pride month

You can’t spell Solidarity and Pride without the I. In the same way, solidarity cannot be fulfilled with just an I.

To commemorate the Pride month that is celebrated during the month of June every year, I decided to document my thoughts on celebrating this community. 

Pride Parades are a commonality in the Netherlands.Since the Netherlands has a few canal based cities like Utrecht, Amsterdam the scale at which these parades happen is massive. It happens for almost the whole day with different members of this community proudly canoeing through the canals in heavily decorated boats. 

I attended my first Parade in Utrecht with a few of my friends in June 2019 .

I was in constant awe throughout my time there.  The extravagance of the community, the members and the boats was simply fascinating. 

The number of people that flock to these cities to watch the parade are in thousands. That moment got me thinking, how wonderful it was to celebrate love and people. The eccentricity  perceived as weird and unusual on any regular day was normalized on that day. With no judgement about dressing code, behaviour or expectation about how to be in public. Everyone had their own sweet time but together.

I lived in Utopia for a brief few hours. 

This like the Grimm’s fairy tales is not the full truth.This euphoria should not compensate for the violence and shaming done to this community. In most parts of the world, embracing our sexuality and gender is not normal. I started writing this blog with an intention to not preach or lecture anyone about how they need to behave. 

Morgana Bailey, an HR activist, in her TED talk says “Hiding is a progressive habit”.

As we silence ourselves habitually, it makes it difficult to suddenly turn a new leaf and voice out our opinions when the time is right.

This blog is an attempt to encourage you to raise your voice whoever you may, be for injustice, for discrimination, for normalizing social and cultural norms, for that friend who trusted you and came out to you, for standing up for values that protect human rights. 

I am not a fan of romanticizing the pain and moral policing the world on social media. I think social media activism starts and ends there.

As my friends rightly pointed out in one of our conversations “ Does social responsibility end with making an instagram post”?

It most definitely does not. So, how can we take action to end this (at least attempt to end) this injustice? Of Course by normalizing it. 

Normalizing it by making a friend in this community, by hanging out with these friends in the public, by recommending your company to hire talents from this community. After all, Talent has NO gender; Normalizing it by calling out the injustice when it happens in your social circle or in your families, by supporting their cause.

Can we normalize being human?