'We are past times where homosexuality considered anomaly'

For novelist, playwright and filmmaker Sachin Kundalkar, society has moved past the time when homosexuality was considered an anomaly.
"We are past the times where homosexuality was considered an anomaly. It's a part of life. Why classify it as something separate?" says the filmmaker, whose debut novel in Marathi "Cobalt Blue", has been longlisted for a English translation.
Kundalkar, a recipient of two National Film Awards, says he constantly feared that his book first published in 2006 and whose translation released recently, would be classified as gay literature since it featured a homosexual character.
"We must move ahead now, every book or a film or a TV show which has a homosexual character is looked at in a different light," says Kundalkar.

His book translated earlier by novelist and translator Jerry Pinto, is one of the three translations longlisted for the fourth-edition of USD 50,000 DSC Prize for South-Asian Literature.
The work set in Pune, showcases the duality of existences of two siblings Tanay and Anuja, whose lives are thudded when an artist enters their lives as a paying guest in a middle-class Marathi household.

The fiction flows in two separate narratives - each a monologue, showcasing duality vis-a-vis a stranger who could transform lives of two individuals.
It delves into concepts of love and relationships through two episodic, relatively complex narratives - Anuja's journal entries and Tanay, a homosexual who address the paying guest directly.

"The book has always been about individual characters who aren't affected by any norms. Fortunately, it was never looked in the light of homosexuality and an award would only encourage me," admits the one-novel old author.