In Defence of the Ordinary: Everyday Awakenings

In Defence of the Ordinary is laced with light humour, soaked in serious sarcasm and powered with poetic polemics. It is a sociologist's sincere ruminations on a wide range of aspects related to ordinariness. Informed by sources like psychoanalysis, philosophy, yoga, anthropology, popular cinema, folk songs, and everything that is part of ordinary living, Pathak invites readership in contemporary India to rethink the ways of seeing, understanding, enacting, emoting and relating. This is not blind to the burning issues of human ordinariness, for example, developmentalist mindset of consumers, violence of sexual desires, interpersonal relations in the age of mediations, emotions in the time of vulnerable sentiments, memory and forgetting, complexity of living and dying inter alia. Yet, the author underlines the humanistic possibility in the domain of the ordinary. Mixing wit and wisdom, traditional and modern, and mythological and historical, In Defence of the Ordinary provides a rare reading of Indian ordinariness. The provocative ideas, such as why don't we value ordinariness, how is our pursuit of extraordinary misleading us into mishaps, are at the core of this volume. The key objective of human existence becomes that of the book, namely, awakening the dormant potentials of emancipation every day rather than waiting for an occasional charisma induced by a holy book, or a secular gimmick or an orchestrated leadership.