This is a Guest Post by AKHIL KATYAL

To make our point let us begin with a story of a salon. It might have all the necessary noise of being new and first-of-its-kind but finally it is quite an unremarkable story. Of ‘NYC’ in Hauz Khas market in Delhi. It sells itself as India’s first LGBT salon. Its owner S. Mehta recently filled up all possible online LGBT forums with its ads, mass mailed on to Delhi list serves and dropped tiny text-ads into unwitting facebook groups, robustly selling it as the latest asset of Delhi’s LGBT community. I am not quite interested in how an otherwise 7 month old – some say not-doing-too-great – business venture is viably repackaged as a LGBT paradise in the wake of the Delhi high court judgment. After all, post the repeal of Sec. 377 in July we are only to expect more of this happening around us, more spectacles of the pink rupee. Nor am I presently interested in how a reigning sense of an LGBT community is proffered by such spectacular announcements of things shared – be it historic events or commercial joints, shared among few or many – but instead, I am interested in the all too common rhetoric that this salon uses in its publicity. A rhetoric that is becoming so widespread as to become almost commonsensical and this is the rhetoric of comfort.
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