When I watched this movie — The Imitation Game
He was a prodigy, and since childhood, he was nothing like a normal kid wanting to play. He was into Codes & deciphers when the guys his age were learning algebra. He turned out to be one of the brilliant minds of the world and chose to teach at a University professionally when suddenly he received a letter from the British government to work for a secret service. He was supposed to work with a couple of more great mathematicians & his job was to decipher the German messages, sent through a highly advanced machine known as Enigma. The problem was, that the German changed their settings every day, so no matter how many calculations they did in a day, they are thrown in the trash at the end of each day, & they have to start fresh again.
It was technically impossible to reach solve this manually, there were millions & millions of probabilistic settings for this machine. So while the others worked their asses off in their trial-&-error methods, he focused on building a machine to decode these messages. It was a brilliant idea, but not approved by his colleagues or seniors, since there was no guarantee of it to be successful, besides hundreds were dying every day in the war. But he was deterministic to overcome each & every hurdle on his path. After 4 years of hard work & perseverance, he was successful to create this machine which he called “Christopher”, named after his best friend, and now we call it “Computer”.
But, here’s the catch, he was Gay. He loved Christopher, but unfortunately, he died at a very early age. He never loved anyone again, but he did have physical relations with men. This was during the 1960s. As we know, until very recently, homosexuality was illegal in the whole world. So, when the people found out about, he was prosecuted and given a choice between a sentence to prison for 2 years, or some hormonal medicines which are supposed to “Cure his sexual illness” & “make him a man” again.
He chose the medicines, & eventually, killed himself a year later. We (as a society) didn’t lose a brilliant man to depression, we rather killed him. This made me reminisce about all the protests that happened all over the world to legalize homosexuality and to treat the LGBTQ community with equality and respect.
I couldn’t help but wonder, why did we even have these laws against homosexuals in the first place?
The laws, rules, regulations, the constitution, these things were created for a peaceful & crime-free world so that we can sleep at nights knowing that we are safe. But why did we ever create rules stating homosexuality is a crime? It is nothing but an act of love. Was it even required?
