Me, it’s me Khaled Hasan. I present here my confusions and confessions to me. A community for its own benefit laid out few rules and regulations, which we call religion or social discipline. I am trying to explore these values.

It is bizarre but true that everything in the entire world springs from a unique question. This question can challenge anything, the ancient or modern customs, morality and established systems. The question that arises inside me also questions my thoughts, my existence and creates a divide in my soul. This division is not about my sexual identity or social but it is mired in politics. Just as I know my breathing, I am conscious of these divisions, know them by heart. If I don’t accept these divisions, there is no way of maintaining my existence. I can’t even blame anyone around me. I had no choice but to accept it.

Since my birth, I have been on a restless journey through traditional paths and mores. Bowing my head, paying homage to values set by others. I have been participating, pushing myself to fit into different shapes and forms, based on common aspirations of a society. In this process, I have witnessed different elements, characteristics of the animate and inanimate objects, virtues and vices of man—stranger than the aliens—all in all evocative sensations.

I was born into a Muslim family, and I fell in love with a woman, who is Hindu. I was born in Bangladesh, she in India. When we decided to marry we were engulfed in chaos, our families opposed the match. Our marriage is a social error, politically wrong, they said. But we believed it is not our fault that our families belong to different religions, that they don’t like each other’s religions. We are just two people in love. Isn’t this simple fact enough? I faced death threats, we were on the run for months, and we were stripped of all support. We became fugitives in another country. In the realm of religion we have sinned. They seized the opportunity to punish us, after all we have defiled their faiths, debased their trust in us. Only for religion? We suffered and continue to be separated because of the faith of others. They try to squash our love to prove their devotion to religion. So, what is our identity? Is she still a Hindu and I a Muslim? Haven’t we lost it? Isn’t this rape of our rights, our humanity and our personhood? Isn’t this the death of individuality, thereby death of “them” and also yours? At the funeral of two individualities, I lay confused. Have we embarked on a wrong path or our way is right and theirs wrong?

Since 2008, I have been documenting myself with my photographs. I want to share my inner emotions with others. I am known as a social documentary photographer, but in my social status, I feel, I am not a social human being. I always controlled by the society and religion. I want to be free.

Even after all these, a violent brutal male human character, often rise up through my veins to burst out of my being. Will these tensions break open the shell and usher a new dawn? Or are they just hype, a fake rising, like that of my forerunners? Like other common believers, I have been faithfully following rites and rituals. But agonistic devils try to tempt me, ceaselessly. This endless, nonstop confusion will continue till the end of my existence.