The new normal

What seemed strange just a few years ago no longer causes any raised eyebrows

It struck me first a few months ago when I was away on holiday. No matter which restaurant I went to, expensive or cheap, formal or informal, trendy or old-fashioned, the diners seemed to be more interested in photographing their food than eating. The moment a dish was placed on the table, everyone would whip their smartphones out and begin clicking away. If the restaurant was badly-lit, the pictures were taken with flash, which annoyed me immensely, but left everyone else unmoved.

That’s when it hit me. This is the way diners are expected to behave in restaurants. Because if you don’t take a picture of that exotic new dish you ordered, can you really be sure that you actually ate it? For that matter, can we? So, everyone clicks away while the food grows cold. And nobody thinks that this is at all odd. This is, in fact, the new normal. 

And that got me thinking. How many things that we earlier considered decidedly strange do we now regard as completely normal? The selfie is the first thing that comes to mind. The days when taking pictures of yourself pulling duck faces was seen as a sign of a serious narcissistic personality disorder are gone. Now, the selfie has become so commonplace that nobody even comments on it, leave alone give you strange looks when you take one.

It is that other new-fangled contraption that attracts odd looks when you use it. Yes, I am talking about that plague on human civilization, called the selfie stick, that is rapidly conquering every tourist spot, every museum, every historical palace, one picture at a time. But how long do you think it will be before we start seeing this as entirely normal as well? Going by the selfie experience, not very long at all.

So, what are the other things that best embody the new normal? Well, it is a long list, but here are just a few things off the top of my head.

• Cosmetic work: There was a time when those who resorted to plastic surgery or cosmetic intervention of any kind were seen as vain, even deluded, for trying to interfere with the work of nature. No longer. These days, getting Botox and fillers is seen as being as commonplace as getting a facial or a manicure/pedicure. Nobody raises an eyebrow (possibly because they can’t) if you confess to having had your face ‘done’. Most women who can afford it have their dermatologist on speed dial, scheduling a Fraxel laser treatment or a Thermage session. And nobody thinks anything of it.
• The mainstreaming of porn: The arrival of the Internet made porn readily accessible to anyone who knew how to use a search engine. But there was still a stigma attached to it; people made sure to delete their search history every time they ventured online for a little titillation. Those days are long gone. With the runaway success of books like the Fifty Shades of Trilogy and much else, porn has gone mainstream. (It helps that reading it on a Kindle or any other hand-held device makes it embarrassment-proof as well.) One of the biggest beneficiaries of this trend is Sunny Leone, the porn star who has now been embraced by Indian audiences as a mainstream star.
• Blended families: The era of the nuclear family is over. With divorce rates mounting and re-marriages becoming increasingly common, the blended family is what it is all about these days. Ex-husbands, ex-wives, new wives, new husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, live-in partners, step-kids, half-siblings, step-siblings, all jostle each other around the family table on occasions like Diwali, Holi, Onam or Lohri (or even, this being India where we celebrate every festival we can get out hands on, Christmas and Easter). They eat, they drink, they laugh, they squabble, they sulk, they make-up, they eat and drink some more. It is a beautiful sight.
• Start-ups: Just as in my generation, everyone you spoke to was writing a novel (or thinking about writing one), in the new generation that has just been decanted from college, everyone is working on a start-up (or at the very least talking about working on a start-up). Names like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal are thrown about along with figures that make my mind boggle as everyone talks up the valuation game. All I know is that if I had a dollar for every start-up that I hear about, I would have enough money to launch a start-up of my own.
• Over-sharing: As the joke goes, in the old days you put all your inner-most thoughts and feelings into your personal diary and got seriously annoyed if anyone read it; these days you put all your inner-most thoughts and feelings on to social media, and get very upset if no one pays attention. This is an age of putting it all out there. Your holiday pictures go on Facebook and you wait anxiously to see how your friends react. Every stray thought makes its way on to Twitter, and you measure your self-worth by how RTs (that’s retweets in case you are still living in the 20th century and have not discovered Twitter) it notches up. And then, of course, there are all those food pictures cluttering your phone, which duly do duty on Instagram to tell people what a charmed life you lead. What’s not to ‘like’?

I’m sorry, but that’s private

No, that’s not a phrase that goes down well in a world gone mad on over-sharing

Like almost everyone else on the planet who is in possession of a mobile phone, I am haunted by spam smses. Not an hour goes by without my being exhorted to buy a flat; get a car loan; upgrade my water purification system; dine at the all-you-can eat buffet at a local restaurant; and most worrying of all, lose weight with a magic sauna belt (now, how could they possibly tell?).

This is irritating enough when I am in the country. But it drives me insane when I am abroad and end up having to pay several thousand rupees for the privilege of receiving offers I have expressed no interest in and will never ever take up.

The same goes with email. I can understand being inundated by nonsensical mails on the email id given below this column, because honestly, what else do you expect if you offer yourself up like the proverbial sacrificial lamb for slaughter by spam? But, more mystifyingly, my private email id which is shared only with friends and family, is also routinely clogged with importune messages from people I don’t know and organisations that I have never heard of.

I don’t know about you, but I find it incredibly annoying when my privacy is breached in this manner. Is it too much to expect that your phone number and email id be kept private by your service providers? Isn’t confidentiality part of the deal when you sign up with a phone company or an email service?

Well, you would think so, wouldn’t you? But within days of signing up, your information mysteriously leaks out into the public domain – and from then on, it’s only a matter of time before you’re spammed into submission.

Clearly, having even a reasonable expectation of privacy as you go about your life is asking for too much in this hyper-connected world. There is nothing that a dogged telemarketer – or a determined stalker – cannot discover about you in the digital universe.

Mobile numbers and email ids are small change in this world and finding out your address mere child’s play. Your credit card details are no longer out of bounds. Information about your purchase decisions is bought and sold by large corporations. What you wear, where you holiday, what you eat, how you relax, what you read, your choice in music – it’s all out there, waiting to be discovered by various interested parties.

So, given that so much of our lives inadvertently end up being lived out in the public domain, is it even possible to lay claim to a private life any longer? Well, I am old-fashioned enough to hold out for privacy but it seems to be an endangered concept – an idea that is rapidly vanishing under the concerted assault of social media and aggressive marketing.

But then, how could the concept of a life lived privately survive when all of us are complicit in invading our own privacy? I have become used to be being laughed at – good-naturedly, but still – by friends because I don’t post my vacation photo albums on Facebook or Twitpic my latest culinary adventure on to my Twitter page.

Why, they ask, am I not willing to share my experiences with the world? Why this pathological insistence on keeping my private life private? What harm can a few pictures possibly do? Why am I so secretive? What is there to hide?

Frankly, I can think of no better route to mind-numbing boredom that being forced to view pictures of other people’s holidays/weddings/children/pets, so I wouldn’t dream of inflicting my own personal albums on an already-suffering world. But more than that, I have a peculiar horror of sharing my private moments with people on a public forum; making my personal life public property, as it were, by posting it on the Internet. And yes, there a difference between ‘secret’ and ‘private’ – as anyone above the age of 18 should know.

But from what I see around me, I seem to be part of a minuscule minority. The overwhelming majority is made up of people who see nothing amiss in sharing every moment of their lives – be they ever so banal. It’s almost as if they don’t believe that any event has truly occurred until it has been shared with the world via the internet – and someone has pressed the ‘like’ button or posted a comment.

Take a look at your own Facebook page or Twitter feed and you’ll see what I mean. You will be inundated with stuff you never needed – or wanted – to know. Your old school-mate’s child has had a fall in the schoolyard (‘poor baby’); your cousin in America is ‘partying hard’ in Las Vegas (don’t forget to click on that ‘like’ button); your former colleague has landed a dream job (grrr...); well, you get the drift.

Why do people post such a great detail of personal information in the public domain? I guess it’s comes down to a combination of a number of factors: a honest desire to share; a propensity to show-off; a certain degree of self-aggrandisement; sheer vanity; or just plain gormlessness.

But it certainly seems as if people want validation for every moment of their lives – and they can only get that by sharing every detail of their routines online.

In such a world, what price privacy? No, you can’t buy it for love or money. And, if you ask me, more’s the pity.