The Normal and the Abnormal

 3 December is observed as World Disability Day. We would have, atleast once, come across people with disabilities. The first thought that arises in the mind is sympathy. Following that, a series of questions may arise. We would wonder how they lead a normal life like us. How is it possible for them to have a successful career with a healthy family and so on. In such cases, the inquisitiveness in us boosts up! 

Disability Studies emerged in 1980s in the UK, US and Canada.  It differentiates "impairment" and "disability" thus: the former indicates physical or mental impairment and the latter stands for a social construct. These studies focuses on physical disabilities. Scarcely does anyone study and research mental disabilities; the abnormal people who stare and gossip on  this community with impairment! Male-exclusionary feminists believe that men can not be true feminists because they do not have the experience of living as a woman, such as facing the discrimination and stereotyping that women do (Wikipedia). Similarly, people with disabilities are to speak out their thoughts, not the one who studies them. 

One Little Finger is a personal narrative by Malini Chib, a Bengali Social Activist and a differently abled woman. She takes the reader on the wheel chair as she paints her imprisonment to the carriage since her childhood. She was identified as a disabled child since her infancy. Her sound family was able to educate her despite her physical impairment. She enjoyed her studies in foreign universities where disparity being differently abled was not encountered. Situations dragged her to return to India for higher education. This was like a fish out of water. Her life in India was horrible, she says. Teachers at colleges, doctors and nurses at hospitals treat her not as a human being, but as an object. She painfully expresses in the narrative the manner in which they take her in the wheel chair. She longs to be treated as 'normal'. She pleads the horse blinded and ear muffed onlookers that she is to be treated as normal. 

Human beings are born with an instinct to imitate what Aristotle called mimesis. Chib implores the special schools not to be 'special' for these differently abled may imitate a similar group of kids and shall never grow 'normal'. She differentiates the system followed in the European countries and in India. She felt more at home staying and studying abroad. Where as, she was alienated in her own native land.

She discovered that she is not normal when she was forced to be a part the particular community. She also shares about her longing to have a boy friend like any other girl. Her abnormality denied one. She craves for the presence of a lover but of no avail. 

When she stops the narrative dropping the reader off her wheel chair, the reader identifies himself as not 'normal'. Normal and abnormal are to mind, not body. Chib penned her life with her one little finger! Those 'normal people with all 10 fingers and toes in place struggle to make their life and meet both ends. 

Coming across a differently abled person shatters all the normality in him. Being normal is to mind, not body. Let's inculcate a habit of treating everyone equal instead of considering some as 'more equal'. A random visit to our thoughts will help us rectify this disability we have internalised. 

Ms. Saritha. K, Head, Dept. of English, Al Shifa College of Arts and Science, Kizhattoor Perinthalmanna,