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There is a Hindi phrase: Seeng kata ke bachhada banana (A bull removing his horns to look like a calf). This seems to be happening in the political arena ever since the Cockroach Janta Party made being young, ah so ‘cool’.

“It’s the new normal,” said a friend, as we stood surveying the fallen trees and branches littering the neighbourhood after a sudden downpour that vanished just as suddenly after causing havoc all round. Soon with the onset of winter plumes of smoke from burning crop residue will come swirling in from the west, forcing the elderly and the asthmatics indoors. That too will be termed a ‘new normal’.

It’s a phrase that by now fits all things that are beyond our control like death. We use euphemisms for all such scary occurrences: death notices inserted in newspapers or WhatsApp groups, about so-and-so having gone to his ‘heavenly abode’ or to the Great Beyond, making man’s fear of extinction less visible by quoting lines of poetry.

True, in the last couple of years, much has swept off the old normal. The smoke or the red sandy storms moving menacingly from Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab into the NCR have almost destroyed our balmy winters. Our monsoons are no longer the stuff of Benarasi kajri or old Bolly songs celebrating romance and the renewal of greenery all around. Train lines, roads and tunnels, some inaugurated weeks prior, are washed away. The hills, being bored for tunnels, and ill-planned new roads simply give way.

And all that governments and their supporters come out with in its defence is that it’s the ‘new normal’. They dare not utter the word ‘abnormal’ for fear of the opposition taking to the media and reminding citizens what it was like earlier under their regime.

At most the government and its agencies point out........

© The Wire