by Raja Dutta

While surfing the intermittent pandemic waves the conscience of the human race has coined a phrase– the new normal–no more endemic to the literary sheets. This phrase is redefining the matrix of survival and existence within the biosphere. As if the planet wishes to reset its ecological parameters at the push of a master key. The enforcing alterations are inevitable for both the human and the natural world. But is it only the humans who are adapting to the new settling norms? What is the response of the natural world and wildlife to such reorientation?

The pigeons on the streets don’t see hands stretch out to litter grains everyday; the dogs that stray around the food shops are greeted with shutters down; the fishes often rise to the surface in vain as some are used to bread crumbs or puffed rice. Can the natural world be experiencing alienation from the human world? The wildlife might have settled into a zone of comfort with human encroachment in some aspects. How is nature welcoming the new normal?

What is normal for whom?

Chunks of the human race have survived through the onslaughts of time by adapting to the changes. All of us breathing alive are probably mutants on the path of evolution– a variable mistake. To err is human, someone said and we have indeed normalized our variety of mistakes to survive. Do we not survive on our mistakes?

The novel virus is striving to survive within the human biophysical space– through the solids, liquids, and gases. The space of the human body is the new normal for the virus as well. It cannot survive in an isolated cell. It has to multiply to cells, to conquer, to colonize, and to alter what comes in its way of survival. Then the variants play, when leisure has taken over the mere necessity to survive. In leisure is the evolution, through the mistakes; until mistakes become the new normal.

Edison survived a thousand attempts, every attempt a mistake, to glow light through the filament until it lit at the last one. History has kissed the last one as success. What if the last one was one among those variable mistakes, since then declared as the new normal– the glowing electric lamp. The mistake survived as a success. The man succeeded on a mistake. Aren’t all actions with an unknown output a mistake, until it is crowned– the normal?    

The human race is chasing its survival amidst the pandemic with its dire urge to evolve out of its known bondages of the normal; those are gradually depleting into history, awaiting the new normal. The stretching minds in lab coats are attempting mistakes, one after another, as they know not that one concoction yet, so they feed on their urges to study the effects of several potions that are available and normal to them. While these potions heal a few, they welcome some new, the fungal storm in shades of dark and light.

Chase! Chase! Oh human race, you have to survive on your mistakes until you commit the greatest one, the one that goes past the normal and you hail– the new normal!

Who knows what would be the new normal?

Is it a void that some chunks of the yet breathing race are going to survive into?

About the Author:

Raja Dutta is from Kolkata, West Bengal and has an M.A. in English. At present he works as a teacher of English. He has also worked briefly as a Curriculum Designer for Teach For India.

Raja is a creative thinker, writer, and a spontaneous poet at heart. His poem has been recently selected in a competition organized by OXFORD BOOKSTORE and is forthcoming in an anthology publication. He has also made his first editorial contribution in Indian Fiction in English: Mapping the Contemporary Literary Landscape. Creative Books: New Delhi. 2014. Print. ISBN 978-81-8043-108-1.