Losing sense of ‘normal’

I have seen dozens of dystopia movies, but read zero such books. Somehow, dystopia looks better as moving images than words. Words, I have always assumed, should either interpret the real world or create a sense of realism that is possible to live, experience or occur somewhere in the distance.

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Today, when normal looks like ‘dystopia’, I visualise reality through movies. Normal is not supposed to exist. The word which entered the English dictionary in the 1840s came from Latin ‘norma’, meaning ‘T-square’ or perpendicular. It astonishes how a word which was invented to connote scientific calculations and dry jargon parlance became a yardstick to measure everything that exists below or above the word. It perhaps gave us terms such as, ‘wallflower’ or ‘introverts’ or ‘abnormal’. This word somehow was able to render many as ‘misfits’ and have killed others for centuries.

However, it is now about measuring the ‘normal’ against a blazing pandemic. Covid-19 has laced our grey humdrum and weekend guffaws with shades of blue. There are brochures to use flaky soaps and smelly sanitisers. News anchors feigning wisdom over politics, policies and violence fill their primetime with scientific chutzpah through hazy Skype videos. Over decades, we have normalised many things, poverty and rampant migrations exist simultaneously, with the shimmering cocoon of urban life.

We have divided our lives into different spheres. We have specific straitjacketed ways of dealing with colleagues and neighbours and our mystique dalliances roost within our private sanctuaries. In a public place or office, we are more exposed to external dangers, physical and mental; but we have managed to make things mostly predictable.

Most of us compartmentalise our lives into various zones of familiarity. Only when something twists our structured perpendiculars of comfort, we wake up and rub our eyes. To grasp our unique sense of reality, and in my attempt to understand human psyche, I will prefer to read stories about starvation, migration, indigenous communities in India, etc., and their plight during Covid and not a novel on love during Covid or sci-fi ramblings.

Unlike ancient times when even going out for a hunt or a stroll was enough to risk one’s life, today, a sort of written and unwritten code, safety measures and predictions govern our lives. Perhaps, that’s why the word normal emerged, reflecting our everyday lifestyle. It is also the reason why we have literature on dystopia, fantasies and magical realism to give us the thrill of unpredictability and adventure without making us take real risks.

However, it is time to see the ‘normal’ in many other shapes than the perfect perpendicular and ‘T-squared’. If we can normalise poverty, caste/class hierarchies and exploitation, what else remains abnormal? The abnormal is our imagination when bad things come home to haunt our everyday privileges and predictions.