Shaleen Rakesh

Shaleen Rakesh is an Indian author and poet whose work attempts to blend lyricism, philosophical inquiry, and an intimate attentiveness to the natural world.  As an activist, he played a leading role in India’s sexuality movement and was the primary petitioner who filed the landmark 2001 legal challenge against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the colonial-era anti-sodomy law. This sparked a l egal journey that eventually led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India.  Beyond his foundational activism, he built a career as an international development executive and a literary writer whose work is concerned with themes of ecology, intimacy, and human vulnerability. His books include the novel Madness ; Constellations , a work of philosophical non-fiction; the poetry collection The Lion and the Antler ; and An Equal Indian , a study of sexuality, identity, and social change.

Every city possesses an overlooked vocabulary: the call of a bird before rain, the slow growth of moss on an old wall, a bicycle left beneath a tree. Literature begins not with extraordinary events but with sustained attention to ordinary life.

Mountains are often mistaken for monuments. Yet they are among the world's most patient archives—recording weather, memory, migration, and silence across millennia. To learn a landscape is to discover that it is already reading you.

Every morning, before traffic gathers on the road at Aamwala crossing, Baba unfolds a worn piece of canvas beneath the old peepal tree. He places his wooden box beside him, arranges his awls, needles, waxed thread and tins of polish with quiet precision, and waits. The first customer rarely arrives before the tea has cooled. For nearly forty years he has sat beneath the same tree. Children who once came with torn school shoes now return with children of their own. Office workers who hurried past him in their twenties now walk a little more slowly, asking about his knees before handing over their sandals. Time has changed almost everything around him, but the peepal tree still offers its shade, and Baba still bends over leather with the steady patience of someone who has learned that almost everything worth repairing takes time. People say he can read a person by their shoes. He never claims this himself. He only notices things. A heel worn more on one side than the other tells ...

The road to Mussoorie stirred. It was the schoolchildren who woke it — small clusters of them, satchels bouncing against their shoulders, voices tangled in homework and cricket scores and the possibility of rain. Beyond them the hills waited in clouds, patient and half-hidden, while the smell of last night’s monsoon clung to the earth, rising each time a foot presses the wet ground. Outside a shop no bigger than a doorway, someone turned up a radio. Kabhi Kabhie mere dil mein… The song arrived with the morning light — unbidden. The children walked on. Songs were nothing new to them. Ahead lay gates, friends, the long unspooling of a school day. But one boy slowed down. He was round-faced, small, his bag too large for his shoulders, and something in this melody stopped him mid-step. He couldnt name the singer or the film. He only knew that the music has asked him to listen, and that he must. For a few seconds the road dissolved, the hills dissolved, even his friends’ voices ...

On Canal Road in Dehradun, sits Mehta Tea Shop. A modest counter, a few worn benches, a warm kettle, and always that fragrance — tea leaves surrendering to ginger, cardamom, milk. All day the place shelters people in small waves. Cyclists pause mid-morning, one foot still on the pedal. Forest guards linger before the climb begins. Students stretch a single cup across an hour of nothing in particular. Walkers drift back from the canal and sit a while, letting the evening catch up with them. The tea itself is unremarkable. Made the same way, every time, poured into glasses too small to rush — glasses that warm the palms the way they ease the ache of the day. Nothing here hurries. Talk begins with weather, wanders towards the fields, towards cricket, towards an elephant seen near the treeline last week, towards the monsoon that is always either arriving or leaving. And often enough, no one speaks at all. Silence, too, is welcome at this table. Beyond the shop’s tin roof, the valley ...

Winter arrived late and soft in Hindi film songs. The rains arrived with ceremony — dark clouds gathered, leaves trembled as though they already knew what's coming, hearts restless before the first drop fell. Spring came dressed in blossom. Summer shimmered with longing, heavy and slow. The moon stretched its nights out like silk. But winter waited at the edges of the frame, never quite stepping into the light. Mist thinned over a lake. A singer’s breath was visible for a moment on a hillside, then gone. The India these films imagined — the fifties, the sixties, the seventies — was a country fluent in its seasons. No song had to explain what the first chill meant; the meaning was already in the air, within the audience, who knew the pale gold of a December afternoon, the hush of fields after harvest, the mountains far off and freshly white. They had lived it. The songs only had to remember it with them. Winter here was rarely cruel. It was, instead, a season built entirely of w...

No one saw it arrive. By morning, it had already gone, leaving the night to close over its passing like water over a stone. Its visit was written only in absence. A wound of freshly turned earth beside the vegetable garden. A few potatoes gone missing, as if the ground itself had swallowed them. Small claw-marks scored into the damp soil, faint as a signature no one stayed to read. And sometimes, if the morning was generous, a single black-and-white quill lying beneath the hedge — not dropped, it seemed, but “placed”, the way a visitor might leave a card behind to prove they had truly called. In the villages of the Himalayas, the porcupine is known less by its shape than by these residues — the syntax of a creature that speaks only in traces. It keeps to the hour after the fires have dimmed and the last voices have thinned into silence, when the mountain exhales and settles into its other, older self. Then it moves along paths it alone remembers, pausing to sniff, to dig, to forage, ...

There is a thirst that only a mountain path could teach you. It would gather slowly, the way dusk may gather. An hour into the climb you might notice that talk has thinned to breath, and every bend in the trail revealed a small promise. It is then, when the body would have grown quiet with wanting, that nothing in the world would seem as generous as a cup of cold water. In the Himalayas, water is perennial. It rises from a spring that has been flowing since before anyone in the village had a name for time — before the village itself. It comes up out of the hillside without hurry, pools in a stone basin or slips along narrow channels and moves downhill asking nothing of anyone. No sign marks the place. It doesn’t need one. Those who walk that path already carry the spring’s location the way they carry their own address — somewhere past the third ridge, just where the trees lean in! The water itself is unbearably clear, clear in a way that feels honest. It holds the cold of shaded st...

  The forest began speaking in a different voice when the last person went home. Towards evening, the familiar sounds slowly faded. The laughter of children returning from school disappeared along the footpath. Women carrying bundles of fodder emerged from the trees and made their way towards the village. The ringing of a shepherd's bell grew fainter as the flock rounded the hillside. Even the woodcutter's axe fell quiet. For a brief moment, the forest seemed to hold its breath. Then another day began. The first to appear were the birds that prefer the fading light. Their calls were fewer but carried farther through the cooling air. A squirrel made one last hurried journey along a branch before vanishing into its nest. Somewhere deeper in the woods, a barking deer gave its sharp, uncertain cry. As darkness gathered, moths replaced butterflies, and the patient work of the night quietly began. Most visitors imagine that forests are busiest during the day because that is w...

Long before there were villages, or temples, or paths worn into the mountains by human feet — there was only snow. A rich white carpet for miles. Winter came, and then winter came again, falling upon the young Himalayas in a silence that was so complete that it seemed to ask nothing of the world. At the highest elevations, where the sun’s warmth could never quite climb high enough to reach it, the snow stayed. It survived. Each storm lay down upon the last, patient, unhurried, until the weight of uncountable winters pressed the snow into something else entirely — blue, glacial, vast. And although it looked frozen, like stillness itself, it was, in truth, always moving, ever so slowly. The glaciers flowed downhill so gently that a single human life was too short to notice the journey. Beneath all that snow, the mountains too were still becoming. Far below the ice, the Indian continent went on pressing itself against Asia, lifting the Himalayas by the width of a few millimetres each ye...

The last house before the forest begins is rarely remarkable. Its walls are weathered by decades of rain and winter sun. A stack of firewood leans against one side. Prayer flags may flutter from the roof, or perhaps only old clothes left to dry. A dog sleeps in the doorway, opening one eye whenever footsteps pass. Beyond the courtyard human intention gives way to the patient designs of the forest. Every village in the Himalayas seems to possess such a house. It is a magical threshold. Here, cultivated fields end. Footpaths narrow. The smell of cooking fires begins to mingle with damp earth and pine needles. The sounds of conversation become intermittent, replaced by the murmur of unseen streams, the tapping of a woodpecker, or the wind moving through deodar branches. Those who live in the last house know the forest differently from visitors. They know which herbs appear after the first monsoon rain and where porcupines cross the path at dusk. They recognise the call of a barking deer...

There are birds that seem to have been carved from the oldest chapters of the earth, and there are birds that appear to have been invented by the wind. In the forests surrounding Dehradun, the Great Hornbill and the Indian Paradise Flycatcher live beneath the same canopy, yet they could hardly embody more different imaginations of life. The Great Hornbill is a monument disguised as a bird. Its immense yellow casque sits atop its bill like the weathered dome of an ancient temple, and every beat of its wings announces its arrival long before it comes into view. It does not seem to fly so much as proceed with authority. Even the forest appears to acknowledge its passage. There is something deliberate in its movements, something stately and almost ceremonial, as though it has inherited responsibilities from an age before human memory. The Indian Paradise Flycatcher belongs to another order altogether. It is lyrical. The white male, with his impossibly long streamers of a tail, seems less...

The rain begins the way all important things begin — without announcement, present where a moment ago it was not, touching the river's surface, in a cadence she did not choose to hear and cannot now unhear. She is sitting on a wall. This is the whole fact. She is sitting on a wall, above a river in a city that has been arguing with itself for a thousand years, and has not resolved anything and is still here, still beautiful, still turning in the afternoon light, like a thing that has forgotten it was supposed to arrive somewhere. The boats pass. A leaf trembles. Her breathing is doing what breathing does and she notices this — notices the noticing — and something in the noticing, quietly steps aside. Shankara told the story of ten travelers who crossed the roaring river and wept, because they could count only nine. Each one counted the others. Each one forgot to count himself. They mourned what was not missing. They stood in their own light and called...

Among the great poets who entered Hindi cinema, Sahir Ludhianvi occupies a unique place. Majrooh Sultanpuri brought the refinement of the ghazal into popular culture. Kaifi Azmi carried progressive idealism into film lyrics. Sahir did something more unsettling. He brought doubt. His poetry is filled with love, but rarely with romantic illusion. It speaks of hope, yet remains suspicious of easy optimism. It dreams of justice, while remaining painfully aware of human hypocrisy. Again and again, Sahir returned to a single question: What remains when we strip away comforting illusions? That question made him one of the most important Urdu poets of the twentieth century and one of the greatest lyricists in the history of Indian cinema. Born Abdul Hayee in Ludhiana in 1921, Sahir’s early life was marked by conflict and insecurity. His parents separated, and he remained deeply attached to his mother, who raised him under difficult circumstances. The emotional wounds of childhood never e...

  She believes she is choosing— the specific confidence of the hand that reaches towards a spine as though the hand decided, as though the self that wanted, preceded the wanting, as though she arrived here by intention rather than by the long, patient work of everything that has been, arranging her for this moment, since before she knew there was a moment being arranged. One foot inside. One still on the pavement. The threshold does not rush her. It has held this position, for years — it knows how long these things take, the moment before life divides into before and after, the last breath of the person you were before you became the person who picked up that book. Meursault stood in the sun and felt nothing he was supposed to feel — or felt it, and could not find the word that would make the feeling legible to a world that required legibility as proof of humanity. Camus gave him the sun and the heat, and the gun, and the absurd silence of the uni...

  The figure of the fakir occupies a cherished place in the mystical imagination of Sufism. Derived from the Arabic word faqīr , meaning "poor" or "one in need," the term refers not merely to material poverty but to a profound spiritual condition. The fakir is the one who has awakened to the realization that every human being is utterly dependent upon the Divine. This awareness of spiritual poverty, known as faqr , is regarded by many Sufis as one of the highest stations on the mystical path. Unlike the conventional understanding of poverty, faqr is not a rejection of the material world for its own sake. A fakir may own nothing, or may possess considerable wealth; what distinguishes him is freedom from attachment. He no longer identifies himself through possessions, status, or worldly ambition. His heart has become empty of the illusion of self-sufficiency, allowing it to become receptive to divine love. In this sense, poverty becomes an inward richness rather t...