The No Normal

A bunch of us have had the fortune of slowing down in the past three months. Though work continues mostly as usual with a few contingency plans thrown in, commute times have disappeared, and evening meals have gotten a lot simpler and cheaper by the virtue of being, well, boring. Unfortunately, that’s the only reality I have experienced closely, sheltered in personal utopia of privilege, not closely following any news in particular because it always ends up being any news in general. To overcome my guilt and avoid feeling hypocrisy too close to my skin, I have used my debit card here and there, thanks to the amazing people in my feminist network who have stepped up to show up for those caught in an unplanned, unjust, unfaithful, indifferent world. With work moving more or less as usual, excessive screen time has ensured that I do not take any of the thousands of free courses now doing the rounds on LinkedIn and the mailed newsletters on my decade old Gmail account. I am my witness, thousands of more relevant and interesting online courses have always been free, and I have never had enough discipline to follow through. I still don’t. I have however, discovered the joy of podcasts and audiobooks which accompany me during my kitchen and workout time. Oh yes, I started working out during the lockdown, something I have never really done before, except for long walks which were never meant to work my body, just my mind. This has given an expression to the love hate relationship I have with my body by the virtue of being a brown woman and a feminist, thank you very much. I must confess, it does make me feel better on the days I’m able to follow through, my habit tracker a barometer of the externalisation of self love. My feminist self sleeps with a hypothesis: a flatter “core” with shapely “obliques” does not diminish sadness, it only squeezes it into less space with more confusion and room for reproduction. My brown female body wakes up to the sight of long to-do lists, rewarded with a cardio workout at 7:30pm, and baked chips (I do not write that one down).

In any case, a bunch of us have slowed down and found new things to do to fool us out of the repetitiveness of time. I have logged out of Instagram to make this illusion stronger, considering IG does quite explicitly make all days look the same, kind of the point anyway. The ones who were baking yesterday are still doing it, those who were funny last night are still good enough to wake up to, the pretty ones remain pretty with a new brand added to their freebie list, those who talk about a cause are still at it and fighting necessary battles in your language, and you’re still here, comfortably scrolling through a world of a million different ideas, not your own, condensed for half eye open consumption before and after work (I won’t tell about the office hours). This kind of permanence of the surface is comforting on wildly varied days of finding balance in the Delhi metro and listening to strangers who wouldn’t and shouldn’t accidentally pop into the vicinity of your moderated Zoom rooms. It serves the purpose of tea when the comfort of a home kitchen isn’t available 24/7. It helps to tickle rather than touch the lives of others when you have so deeply soaked in the day’s stories, some deliberately initiated in Uber Swift Dzires and some casually walked into at the local chemist. But it’s quite another thing when a virus has taken over the world and is serving its time in devastating capacity, albeit leaving one day the same as the next, the pre knowledge of it drowning the excitement of its novelty which IG posts celebrated with virtual concerts, workout routines, and WFH self care routines (all extremely heartening and important by the way). The world after COVID19 has changed vastly, but what’s scary is that it’s probably not a changed sentence, just a bracket open. The ‘new normal’ will fizzle into the old as soon as the bracket closes.

So much remains unchanged. The petty political squabbles over dead bodies, dead by no mistake of their own, continues. The public health systems not only continue to be unequal, unjust, and in shambles, their condition is justified by the crisis. The narrative seems to run along: the best in the world can’t handle a pandemic, so what’s the point of investing in equitable healthcare systems anyway? Profits riding on panic and vulnerability are finding ready translations in preventive measures to avoid needing a bed, because we don’t have those, remember? Domestic violence continues, and continues to be ignored, belittled, and gaslit as an issue in itself. Those who were violent but had to go to work, continue to remain violent and at home, those who had it in them but never felt quite upto it have found the time, and their expression. Girls and women whose mobility was dictated by sunlight have found a new component to look out for- don’t step out, what if you catch the virus? Women who are counted as participants of the workforce (though all of us work) continue to struggle with work life balance, the comforting ‘isolation’ of a physical shift abruptly snatched. Violent or benevolent capitalist patriarchy is not an insertion of the bracket, it is the very page on which everydays are transcripted, crisis or no crisis. Like everything else, ‘high risk’ populations can have many definitions, even for a virus. It’s not just more vulnerable bodies it can attach itself to, it’s historically, and continually vulnerable populations.

 In a woke world waking up to the ‘virality’ of work from home, self care, rights, and equality, it is astounding to think we are aiming for ‘a new normal’. Is that the best we can do? Is that how far our imaginations can go? Isn’t ‘normal’ what got us into this mess in the first place, pre setting boundaries, limits, rules, and expectations, like a large organisation you’re employed into, instead of asked to build? Normal is a geometric, closed construction which prohibits movement in and out, aspirational in its very finality and perceived permanence. It leaves people out. It forgets the free bodies in the space outside, the Corona Virus is only an example of disruption. A significant minority of us have lived on the peripheries of the geometric normal, some of us nudging it persistently, and calling out its ruthless, ‘normalised’ exclusion,#metoo and #blacklivesmatter only being the most recent and very powerful examples. A ‘new normal’ will be a new shape, a new organisation at the centre of the world, arbitrarily defined, with the current gatekeepers barging in once again, reorganizing within.

A bunch of us have had the time to slow down. We are privileged enough to take a breath, enroll for some courses we don’t show up for, sign up for webinars, and tune into podcasts. We’re doing new things, without allowing anything to disturb the comfortable layer of privilege we inhabit, like a permanent state of flight, with no vision of landing. For the first time, everyone is vulnerable, though not to the same degree. For the first time, it’s possible to realise equitable power, equitable vulnerability. It’s possible to visualise free radicals, and open up. Hold the gates, hold them open, and let them stay so. It would be stupid to miss a chance like this for lack of imagination.

 Shouldn’t we atleast, aim higher?