“Everything is Normal”

Creators of Justice Award 2020 | Third Prize: Essay (tied)

Shreyaa Tandel is a poet and writer from India, who has been published in a few anthologies. She has worked as a reader, contributor, and poetry editor with Ayaskala magazine, Marias at Sampaguitas, and Dream Noir magazine (respectively) and has published in several online journals and magazines. When she is not writing, she is either reading, stuck on her phone screen, praying, being grateful or contemplating.

Normalcy. Normal. Norm. perhaps are the most abused words, and their abuse isn’t considered at all. It is just, experienced and tolerated. That’s what my country and it’s glorious, rivers, mountains, culture etc do. There’s many languages yes, but what use are they when the common language is the one of the convenient truth? What use of are they and the tongues that speak them when there’s a greed hiding it’s face in gild and not guilt. 

I have many questions, to those languages, those eyes, and those voices and I also know that after all everything is planned , but that doesn’t dissipate the fact that we’ve become slaves of our dogmas and our dead lives. And I hope not, but this is the situation of not just my country but almost the entire world. We have made it impossible to live life, because we do not live it, we frame it and walk on the paths certain, and extend or break the frames accordingly when it’s the time of our wants and needs. 

Poor live in situations beyond empathy, sympathy and pity. There’s holy chants turned into war cries, there’s perversion of absoluteness of truth and there’s no thing such as righteousness or even equality for that matter. Our country’s significant book on which the country upholds itself has become only a book to be there to show. Speaking of show, while speaking of it all, showing has become the superior because veracity is too mainstream. 

There’s preaching indefinite, by every other person yet there’s no definite truth. There’s no acceptance, neither correction. there’s no trace of constructive implementation. There’s blood in hands, and there’s blindness in eyes. The next morning can be another night, and the night even longer. There’s strength and valor. There’s thought and action, but all of them are too damaged to be undone. The people and their actions too are too damaged to be undone. There’s knowledge yet there’s noise, there’s survival and life yet there’s carcasses piled. 

Duty, rights and laws too have become bookish ideologies. An apathy-less person may now wonder how could everyone be so? and the answer to which is the blood wronged, the people jailed, dying and surviving a dead-end life just because that’s the norm, and that’s the normalcy, that the people full still need to eat more even after they’re nauseous, regardless of the starving stomachs having little to none. But besides everything mentioned, and beyond in it’s reeks, heights and depths, everything is normal.