Abnormal normal

The extraordinary is becoming the everyday ordinary

When Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine fought back, the headline-making word was War. When US and Israel attacked Iran in a campaign that was supposed to be wrapped up in a couple of weeks, War made the headlines again. 

After over four years of Russia-Ukraine hostilities continuing unabated, upper-case War has morphed into a lower-case has-been. 

Much the same happened with the US-Israel-Iran imbroglio. A commentator noted the number of times that Trump has announced Iran’s defeat (55), that a deal with the beleaguered country was imminent (38), and that Strait of Hormuz was about to have a grand opening, all welcome to attend (25). War began sounding like a bore, the repeated ceasefires turning into ceaseless firing. 

While a patchwork peace has been struck between US and Iran, Israel’s continuing belligerence threatens to make war the default option in West Asia.  War, which ought to be an alarming aberration, has become normal, and peace, which should be the norm, has become abnormal.

What has happened to war has also happened to the weather. Increasingly frequent heatwaves, delayed and/or deficient monsoons, and other extreme meteorological events have made the abnormal normal, and the normal abnormal. 

Newsworthiness or its opposite, news-unworthiness apart, mathematically speaking the so-called normal is inevitably the abnormal. To arrive at the normal height for an adult Indian male as being 1.67m, would require taking into account men who are, say, 1.80m or more, and others who are 1.60m or less, and then calculate an average between the two extremes. Which while making mathematical sense becomes nonsensical, with exceptions that prove the rule outnumbering the rule they’re meant to prove. 

Etymologically too, the word normalcy is itself an abnormality. The correct word for normalcy as it is commonly used is normality. However, normalcy was used by Warren G Harding whose 1921 election campaign slogan, ‘Return to normalcy’ after the devastation of WWI and the Spanish flu pandemic, got him into White House, making him the 29th president of US.

Thanks to that abnormality, abnormalcy has become the normalcy in everyday usage. 

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