The New  Normal(revised)

 

It is time to feel excited that 2020 will be a footnote in the annals of world History in less than a week from today. Without an exception, even the atheists, agnostics and sceptics will join the god believers and the eternal optimists to wish and pray for a new dawn when all the anxieties, worries, fears, sadness and sufferings of 2020 would be just history. With hope and excitement, we all look forward to the dawn of 2021 –if not for a miracle to happen- at least for a relief from the one in hundred years pandemic that has drained  humanity of its physical and psychic energy. 

What a year it has been- a challenge to us humans that touched every aspect of our lives. WHO had christened the new highly infectious killer disease, COVID(Corona Virus Disease) when it first surfaced in China in October 2019 and spread its tentacles globally in less than three  months.  Its growth had been terrifyingly rapid, affecting one and all, without social ,gender and class discrimination, sparing neither the rich nor  the poor nor the middleclass, nor the urban-rural fringe.  

The new word Corona has not remained just a medical term, but has become a part of our everyday conversation.  It is unbelievable how  from the sanitary worker to the vegetable vendor to the  street pedlar,  from highbrows to lowbrows, from the cultured to the philistine, from the sophisticated to the shallow, from the cerebral to the dull-witted, from memsahebs to maids, two English words - ‘masks’ and ‘Lockdown’ -  have become a part of their vocabulary.  These two words along with ‘vaccine’ and the ‘ new normal’ have gained a ubiquitous status. Imperative injunctions that earlier disapproved of idioms such as  ‘being masked’ and  ‘being negative’ have shed off their undesirability and gained acceptability among all sections of society. One of the Whatsapp messages  that has  been forwarded many times  has the  oratorical quip  a la  Brutus’ rhetorical funeral oration in Shakespeare’s   Julius Ceasar:

 Who is here so callous that would not wear a mask ?

If any, speak: him I leave to your judgement.

Who is here so unsocial that would not self distance by six feet?

If any speak ; him I leave to your judgement.

Who is here so vile that would not love his fellow beings?

If any speak ; him I leave to your judgement

 Who is here so dull that  refuses to be negative

If any speak, him I leave to your judgement

Who is here so foolish not to want to be negative

If any speak, him I leave  to your judegment

Who is here with unshakeable faith in the golden precept ‘be positive’

If any speak, him I leave to your judgement.

Who is here so lawless who refuses the ‘new normal’

If any, speak; him I leave to your judgement

 

The new normal is to hide behind the mask and remain to some extant incognito till COVID gets masked by vaccine that shall play its three-in-one role as our protector, preserver and saviour. The new injunctions about masks, keep safe distance and wash hands frequently   is nothing new,but only ancient wisdom in modern idiom.  I recall, eight decades back, my father’s quotidian question at the dining table :” Have you washed your hands”? He would expect us to repeat Eliza Dolittle’s answer to Henry Higgins( my father was a great lover of Bernard Shaw and remembered lines from My Fair Lady with ease); ‘I ain’t dirty. I washed my face and hands before I come. I did ‘. The notable difference is there was no sanitizer in those days. Even the word ‘sanitizer’was not a common one. The closest one got to was ‘sanitary inspector’  The water we used to wash our hands  was more often than not well water (as most houses had a well in the backyard). There was no escape from the patriarchal command. Similarly returning home  the first thing was to discard the footwear in the outer veranda and go straight to the bucket placed near the entrance or to the well in the backyard and  wash one’s hands and feet. In course of time these habits were forgotten once we started entering the dining room with shoes on and eating with forks and spoons( mainly  the urban inhabitors -both the urban naxals and the urban anti naxals). COVID has recalled these old habits and reminded us how far we have moved away from our hoary wisdom.

But COVID is also mocking our positive attitude. It has been dinned into our ears from our early days to stay positive, be happy, look adversity in the eye and remain optimistic. 20^th Century English dramatist Edward Bond had remarked “We are optimistic by intuition and pessimists by experience”. Ironically Covid has given us the reverse experience to give up intuitive optimism and embrace the pessimistic negativism. Everyone who goes through the antigen or RT-PCR test regains his positive cheer only after results declare him as negative. Where do we stand now? Be positive or be negative? Well the road to positivity seems through negativity. Covid has taught us not to be foolishly optimistic all the time, but go through the grind of negativism to emerge positive. With experience, seek negative; with hope and faith be positive.  Hope and faith are no longer to be based on feelings but on facts. We have reason to hope as we find human ingenuity coming with vaccine  at the darkest hour. The speed of the miniscule Corona virus measuring 120nanometre has found its match in human inventiveness with its speed of research and discovery of vaccines to put brakes on its fast and furious spread.

True, it is darkest before dawn. We have had experience of staying in the mother’s womb for nine full months. Our anti natal experience has helped us stay put now during the Lockdown for almost 12 if not 12+ months. We have remained incarcerated inside our homes with shut windows and closed doors to caution the Virus that thou shall not cross  the doorsill  of our homes. For once in the early months we followed our hon’ble Prime Minister’s dictum to draw the Lakshman rekha( a strict convention of rules not to be traversed  that will lead to undesirable consequences) to ensure that going out and coming in are prohibited. Much to our dismay, on those occasions like navratra pooja and Diwali when some defiantly crossed the line, we let in the virus to play havoc with millions of lives. Luckily there were quite a number of law abiding citizens who adhered to  the norms to save ourselves and others from the virus  . They along with doctors and healthcare workers including the sanitary staff have been the sentinels to keep the virus at bay. The new normal has given us a new proverb:  “Six feet distance  keeps the Virus at bay. The Pandemic has triggered in us a semblance of discipline, though a lot many chafe against it as an infringement on their freedom.  They fail to understand  that the Pandemic is a one in 100 visitation while our  festivities come every year. A small step in discipline today,, a giant leap  towards a secure future.

 Yet another new normal is to greet with ‘namaste’ and  folded hands. The Western practice of handshake and the middle east practice of hugging that became universal practice has been pushed aside in favour of the Indian way of greeting with folded hands. Our PM’ s signature bear hug that excluded female world leaders, leaders of countries with lower GDP, with below average FDI, with no significant bilateral debt with India and  with less number of NRIs etc can no longer be discriminatory as pandemic has imposed greetings from a distance with folded hands.  Greetings have become formal and distant.

In his new book Now It’s Come to Distances: Notes on Shaheen Bagh,  Coronavirus, Association and Isolation Soumyabarta Choudhhury states that the whole world today is confronted with fhe brute fact of human mortality. The global assault of the pandemic has brought about a global impasse- “not simply an impasse of ‘ oh! we can’t go out.  , we can’t do our usual routine things ... but an impasse of not having the adequate concept for the situation”. I remember in despair I used to look for astrological predictions as to when the pandemic will ease off . I asked an astrologer friend of mine why all the positive indications of the movement of stars and planets as predicted by famous astrologers had failed, she answered warily that this visitation of virus has gone beyond all our knowledge and all our calculations.  We need new knowledge, new approach, new strategy to figure out the whys and whats of such a visitation. It is impossible to abstract knowledge from whatever limited resource we have had. We need a new normal.  Soumyabrata says the same thing: “  the threshold of the new...is what I call the impossible. So the impossible is what makes us do what we do...When we do something new, when we produce something new, when we say something new, it is the impossible that makes it possible, paradoxically” The new normal is to accept that this is the world we belong to. We are at an impasse. We have to overcome it, however impossible it may seem. In that very attempt, the new normal will throw up possibilities to resist the impasse and liberate the world from it.

2020 will be gone in another sixty hours( i write this on the 28^th afternoon). We need not attempt to consign it to the history book. The lessons we learnt as collective humanity against a tiny virus will have to be remembered. Corona Virus has made the world a level playing field. It has spared none  -from Donald Trump to Bolsanaro, from Boris Johnson to Emmanuel Macaron, PM of Russia to PM of Armenia besides billions of men and women from the lowest to the highest rung of the social ladder. Let us not forget the lessons that for once shook us to become aware of the common thread of humanity that runs through all of us.  Let us affirm without fear the universality of  human mortality. Let us remember 2020 with gratitude that has made us realize we are human beings who have unwittingly been host to the virus and suffered en masse the consequences. From arrogance to humility, from bluster to quietness, from bravado to modesty let us look at ourselves not  as conquerors of the world and the universe,  but recognize that the world holds for us  a blank slate on which we  re-write the normal that we had forgotten, the normal that we had discarded and the normal that waits  to be re-engineered as the new normal .