When "Normal" Stopped Being the Point (Opening Ceremony and Networking Event) - Adaiyalam'26 Chennai Mental Health Fest

The morning began the way most House of Hibiscus events do, with Aksheyaa Akilan, the founder, walking the room through what "Adaiyalam" actually means before anything else happened. Last year's fest had centred on decolonisation. This year, she said, the theme had shifted somewhere quieter and harder to pin down: the illusion of normality. Not decolonising a system this time, but questioning the word  "normal" and everything people have quietly bent themselves into shape for, trying to fit it.

She read a line from her own book, Adaiyalam: "For medicine is not what is seen in a chart, but the warmth in a hand." And then, almost in passing, the line that seemed to land hardest in the room: "You were never broken. The scale that measured you was simply broken."

Pooja Srinivasa Raja, founder of Love Hope Company and the event’s guest of honour, picked up that thread almost immediately. Her point was simple and, in its own way, a quiet challenge to everyone sitting there: "The more and more people who voice out, the more it becomes normal." 

Normal, in other words, isn't fixed — it moves when enough people refuse to stay quiet.

Then Chief Guest, Vanitha Rajesh took the stage. As programme director at The Banyan, she's spent years working with homeless people navigating mental health issues, and she had a description of House of Hibiscus that stuck: "an old flower, with a new voice each time." She talked the audience through The Banyan's Home Again model — rented houses where working women managing mental health conditions live together, supporting each other instead of navigating things alone. And then she asked the question that, in hindsight, set up everything that followed that day: "Who decides what is normal? Is it a fact, or is it a privilege for those who have never had to question it?" 

She told the stories of a few of the women she'd worked with. No neat conclusions, no tidy resolution — just people, and the quiet suggestion that maybe "normal" was never a fact to begin with, just something certain people never had the luxury of questioning.

That question didn't stay on stage for long. It walked straight into the networking session with Sanjay Krishna, who opened not with a lecture but with a game.

"If an alien came to Earth for the first time, what would you tell them is normal?"

Then, more specifically: "Would you eat biryani with mayonnaise?" "Would you eat pizza with sauce?"

The room erupted: half in protest, half in confession. People who'd never admitted their odd food combinations out loud suddenly found themselves laughing next to someone with an equally strange one. Sanjay let the noise settle before making his point: "Normality is all about what we decide. It is about the person inside us." Then, almost casually, he dropped the question that quieted the room again: "Why do you have to figure out life?"

From there, the morning turned into something less like a talk and more like a room full of people thinking out loud together.

First, a simple test: a question would be asked, and if it resonated, you stood up. Later rounds dropped the standing and just asked for a raised hand.

Then the rows got involved. Each group was handed a question to wrestle with together — "What is one thing society thinks is normal that you do not agree with?" and the answers that came back were unpredictable enough that nobody in the room seemed to be performing for anyone else. Next came the harder ask: each row had to agree on what the perfectly normal person would even look like. Watching groups actually try to build this person and mostly fail, or land on something absurd — did more to dismantle the idea of normal than any lecture could have.

The last question was the simplest and somehow the hardest: "How would you describe adulthood to a five year old?"

By the time the session wound down, nobody had arrived at a clean definition of normal — if anything, the opposite. But the room left with something looser than a definition: "Love what you do. Do what you love," Sanjay said, closing the event that had spent two straight hours quietly taking the word "normal" apart.