HELLO! India: Keshav Suri wants Pride to be more than a rainbow

HELLO! India: What does Pride mean to you this year?

Keshav Suri: It’s 2026, and Pride should mean accountability. We have spent years building the case for inclusion — the moral case, the economic case, the cultural case. We know that India is home to 135 to 140 million queer individuals. We know queer exclusion costs this country between $1.9 billion and $30.8 billion every year. We know that 91 per cent of LGBTQIA+ travellers factor safety into their destination choices. The data is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the will to act on it. So, this year, Pride means holding the mirror up to corporations, to institutions, to the government, and asking: “You have the numbers. What are you doing with them?” Pride has always been a celebration. This year, for me, it is also a demand.

HELLO! India: Looking back, what part of your younger self are you most proud of today?

Keshav Suri: The refusal to make myself smaller. I grew up in a country and a culture that had very clear ideas about who I was supposed to be. The expectation was that I’d inherit a hotel group, run it professionally, and keep my personal life private in the way that India has always asked its queer people to — present but invisible, existing but never acknowledged. I did not do that. I chose visibility when invisibility would have been easier. And I chose it not for myself alone but because I understood, even then, that the visibility of one person in a position of privilege changes the calculations for someone who has none. That choice, the refusal to disappear, to tone it down, is the thing I’m most proud of.

HELLO! India: What is one myth about the LGBTQIA+ community that refuses to disappear?

Keshav Suri: That acceptance is enough. I hear this constantly, from well-meaning colleagues, from sympathetic policymakers, from brands that have put a rainbow on their logo and called it solidarity. “We accept you” is not the finish line. Acceptance is passive. It asks the queer person to be grateful for being tolerated. What we are actually asking for is equity in employment, in healthcare, in legal recognition, in the ability to build a family without the law treating it as a problem.

HELLO! India: What gives you hope right now?

Keshav Suri: The young people who are done waiting. I spend time with queer Indians in their 20s and early 30s who have a relationship with their own identity. They are not asking for permission to exist. They are not calibrating their visibility based on who is in the room. They are building businesses, leading organisations, creating art, and doing it entirely on their own terms.

Image courtesy: Keshav Suri Foundation