Paromita Vohra
Five Million Incidents

About the Actant

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and dedicated antakshari player, whose work mixes fiction and non-fiction to explore themes of urban life, popular culture, love, desire and gender. Some of her films as director include Partners in Crime, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale, Q2P, Where’s Sandra, Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City, Un-limited Girls and The Amorous Adventures of Megha and Shakku in the Valley of Consent among others. She is the writer of the fiction feature Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters, several documentaries, the play Ishqiya Dharavi Ishtyle, and the comic Priya’s Mirror. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has been widely published and she writes a weekly opinion column Paronormal Activity in Sunday Midday. She is the founder and creative director of Agents of Ishq, India’s best-loved website about sex and desire.

What happens when two people make love is a matter of eternal and changing perception. Between the expressed and unexpressed lie shadows and stars, love and violence and both these questions: what is love, and why didn’t it happen to me? What is love and why did it happen to me?
 

A Love Latika is an electronic creeper, in which these experiences bloom through erotic poems that play as audio clips inside animated flowers. Sanskrit, Prakrit, Arabic, Bangla, Urdu, Tamil, Marathi poems about mating, longing, love-bites, embraces, masturbation, jealousy, orgasms, kisses, waiting, hurting, forgiving.
 
The Love-Latika is imagined as an antidote to the many ways in which our conversations about sex and love have left us ravaged and uncertain – both in personal journeys and in our historical time where discussions on sexual violence push necessarily to the surface. It is an embrace and an immersion into an erotic world, inviting an interior intersectionality of the self, where body, mind and heart are intertwined and fluid, not separated by dogmas and orthodoxies, radical or conservative.