As a poet, I’ve always looked at poetry as a means to interpret life, but in other poets, I’ve found healers. Alok Vaid-Menon is one of those. I encountered them first as a poet, though in truth they defy categorisation as an artist. Moving across stage with verse, standup, fashion and advocacy at their disposal, Alok brings people face to face with a kind of introspection that is sometimes irreverent and hilarious and at others, illuminating and educational. Their work often deals with violence against trans and gender non-conforming people, calling for freedom, self-determination and self-love.
Alok’s comedy special ‘Hairy Situation’ tours India come January. You can catch it in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Goa, Jaipur, Bengaluru and Kolkata. I speak to them about the show, hopes and the glorious in-betweens.
Tell us about Hairy Situation. Your process, what audiences can expect, and where you want to take them with the show?
My show is basically me holding up my brain like a snow globe and saying, “Shake it. See what happens.” My process is living first, writing second, letting things get messy in the real world, then translating that into language, jokes, images, and glitter-covered logic.
Expect irreverence, storytelling, cerebral punchlines, and a kind of joyful camp. With all of my work, I’m interested in exposing the absurdity of a culture that still thinks gender is a fixed, urgent, bureaucratic emergency.
If audiences walk away thinking “I should play more, laugh more, question more,” then I’ve done my job. Humour is a compass. Play is philosophy. The show is a reminder that those are not frivolous, they’re how you survive with imagination intact.
What role do you think poetry and comedy play in the world, currently? How do they interact with each other?
Poetry shows us the beauty of being alive, it ends loneliness by turning private emotions into something communal. Comedy lets us shake feelings off and remember that joy is our default setting, not an exception.
I think they’re constantly interacting. Poetry tilts us toward meaning, comedy tilts us toward freedom. A good life needs both: sorrow to make us honest, laughter to make us possible.
Visibility, violence. Heartache, humour. Resolution, reimagination—your work bridges the gap between many such contradictions. What is a contradiction you are keen to explore next?
I’m fascinated by the contradiction of being both wildly extroverted and deeply introverted. I love solitude, silence, disappearing for days. And I also want to travel nonstop, stand under bright lights, and talk to strangers forever. Both impulses are real. I want to explore that friction, how to get lost in the world and in yourself at the same time.
You advocate for compassion and militant self-love as necessary. How do you show that to yourself in everyday life?
It’s a practice, more like keeping a small fire alive than trying to build a bonfire every day. I don’t always get it right, but I try to add a little fuel whenever I can: rest, forgiveness, good food, honest conversations, letting myself be unfinished. Compassion for the world begins with compassion for myself, and for me that means keeping warmth possible, even on days when I don’t feel particularly generous or loving.
Growing up in an Indian household, I was taught that self-betrayal is a virtue, that putting everyone else first is the moral high ground. I don’t believe that anymore. I am trying to relearn how to take up space without apologising for it, how to tend my own fire without feeling guilty.
I’m not fully there yet, and I think that is okay. Self-love is not a destination, it is something I grow toward slowly, repeatedly, over a lifetime. I like having that as a goal: to keep warmth alive inside myself so I have some to offer the world.
Trans people are constantly dehumanised and delegitimised. There is a lot of talk about how our identity itself is invalid. But your work advocates for a liberation from such restrictive labels for everyone’s sake. How do you navigate that gap between legitimacy and liberation?
I do not believe freedom will ever come from appealing to an unfree world. Legitimacy inside structures that do not recognise our full humanity can only take us so far. I understand we need something like a salve right now, forms of legal recognition and protection, so we can move through daily life with a little more safety. At the same time, I refuse to let paperwork define the truth of who we are.
The larger picture is that no one should have the authority to determine the legitimacy of our genders. That belongs to us. What interests me is navigating that space between the present and the possible, learning how to work in this world while still gesturing toward another one. I believe it is possible to hold both at once. To tend to what is necessary in the moment, and to keep daydreaming of a future where no one has to ask for permission to exist.
What scares you, and what do you do to fight those fears?
I am scared by my own proximity to danger and by the danger faced by the people I love. I am scared of how easily a culture can teach us to turn on each other, to do the work of those who would erase us long before they arrive. I live with a lot of fear, and I do not think that is shameful. The real problem begins when we refuse to name it.
To fight those fears, I look toward the community. I try to find others who feel the same pressure in the air and make a quiet promise to stand with them. Friendship has been one of the most reliable ways I know to survive a volatile world. When we commit to caring for one another, danger does not disappear, but it loses some of its power. It becomes something held in common rather than carried alone, and that shared recognition becomes a small form of safety in itself.
Do you revisit your older work? What do you learn from that, if yes?
Yes, I revisit old work. First, I cringe and think, wow, bold of me to share that with another human being. Then I feel strangely proud. Being horrified by your past self is proof that something is growing. We are supposed to change, to outgrow our own stories. If I ever stop cringing, that might be the real red flag.
In an alternative reality, who would you be? What would you want to do?
I think I would be an interior designer. I want a life where transformation can be accomplished with a different lamp and a better paint colour. Where the greatest dilemma is choosing between two shades of green.
On a deeper level, I love the idea of making spaces that help people feel more like themselves. Arranging a room is its own kind of storytelling. You create a place where someone can rest, think, fall in love, or finally breathe. Maybe that is not so different from what I am trying to do now, just with furniture instead of language.
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Image Credits: Matt Crockett (sourced from Alok Vaid-Menon)