Yearning for the boredom called normalcy

<p style="font-weight: 400;">Can you count how many times have you come across the quote ‘normal is boring’? On T-shirts, in common parlance, in the attitude of teenagers and teenyboppers. Let’s recall that kind of normalcy.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Those were the days, we remember adoringly as we think of life till just a few days ago, not a generation back. The days when we did so many exciting things. At least now they seem so exciting—going to gym, school, college, office, shop, mall, cinema hall; meeting people, doing daily chores, carrying out official and business activities.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Working through the week, welcoming the weekend, enjoying it, and cribbing every Monday morning. There is even a Hindi song expressing this feeling: “…Bloody khooni Monday kyun aaya khoon choosne…” Working again through the week, waiting for the next weekend… the cycle goes on and on. Repeating ad nauseam. The same normal.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Now, we have a new normal. Incarcerated at homes, we keep watching news on television and on the net, keeping fingers crossed, listening to doctors and experts, exposed to the bombasts of cause-hunting celebrities and the sanctimoniousness of politicians. Waiting for the updates on infections and fatalities, in India and elsewhere.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">While the media keeps us informed, the social media informs, misinforms, and entertains us. More than anything else, they keep us occupied. There is so much to do—news, fake news, smart analysis, insightful remarks, moralizing, jokes, morale-boosting quotes and anecdotes, apocalyptic comments and memes.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">But the anxiety, the dread persist; the fear of the unknown haunts us; the fear of doom, which we complacently believed happens only in dystopian literature and movies, surfaces every now and then.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">We had forgotten this fear. Which is quite surprising, because in the history of mankind apocalypse was never off the radar till end of the Cold War in the later 1980s.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">During the Cold War, of course, the threat of the end of mankind was very real. In the 1980s, we learnt in schools and colleges that the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union had manufactured so many nuclear armaments that the entire world could be destroyed several times. Before that were the World Wars; before and during these were not just wars but also famines, massacres, genocides, plagues, and so on.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">It was only in the last four decades that mankind was free of any existential threats. This freedom and the living conditions it resulted in, apparently, made us regard contemporary modus vivendi as boring.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">It was Marilyn Monroe who had said, “Being normal is boring!” Today, however, frightened by the coronavirus and confined to homes due to the lockdown, how we long for the boredom called normalcy!</p>.