Background
Shaleen was born in New Delhi to the famous Indian writer Mohan Rakesh. His father died when he was only two and his mother, Anita Rakesh, also a writer brought him up.
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Shaleen Rakesh
Edit ProfileEducation
He completed his engineering from the Delhi College of Engineering and his Master of Business Administration from the South. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai.
Career
He has been an important part of the Gender and Sexuality Movement in the country for over 20 years. Shaleen was a student of Modern School Vasant Vihar New Delhi. After completing his studies jumped into gay rights activism working initially with the Naz Foundation (India) Trust.
As part of his activism, he was the primary petitioner to challenge Section 377 of the Indian Penal code in 2001, the anti-sodomy law in the country.
Shaleen was also the first activist to initiate a campaign against the psychiatric mistreatment of homosexuality in India through a petition he filed with the National Human Rights Commission of India in 2001. Shaleen wrote the first queer column in a mainstream Indian magazine starting in 2002 for a Delhi based city magazine called Around Town, which ran for two years.
Shaleen started writing poetry from an early age. Shaleen continued writing over the years and starting blogging his poems.
Shaleen is Editor with the independent publishing house OpenWord in New Delhi.
He also writes a queer poetry column for the community blog named hillele.org. His poems have been published in various magazines like (PANK), Bricolage, Pink. The Lion and Antler is his first collection of queer poems, published by World View Publications.
