In Defence of the Ordinary: Everyday Awakenings

Contents: Preface: Off and On Stage. Embryonic Intrigues: On Something and Nothing. 1. A Defence of the Ordinary, or Wishful Thinking. 2. Seeing, Ordinarily, the Seen and Unseen. When There Was Nothing. 3. Lullaby, Tales and Play in the Kindergarten. 4. Anger, Love and Intersections: A Scheme of Ordinary Emotions. 5. Lotus, Mud and Fear of a Sex Beast. 6. Jokes, Abuse, Friends, Enemies and Something Called In-laws. 7. Defiance, Rebellion and Protest: From Embryo to Artificial Intelligence. There Was Something. 8. Flirtatious, Lustful and Committed: An Ordinary Romance. 9. Match, Friendship and Marriage: Looking for Romance. 10. The Teacher, the Taught and Traditions: A Dream Lost. 11. I Am Nothing, Just a Teacher: A Dream Found. 12. Not the Owls of Minerva: Teachers in Higher Education! 13. Mundane Divinity, Rigid Religiosity and Everything Trivial. 14. Ordinary Gandhi in the Time of Extraordinary Gau-Raksha. Cacophony of Celebration? 15. Awry October, Fury of Festivity and Destruction of Virtues. 16. No Ram in the Rant. 17. Blissful and Blasé: Tourism versus Pilgrimage. 18. Models without Roles! 19. Our Ordinary Amitabh Bachchan: Politics, Prejudice and Pride. 20. Gandhi, Nehru and the Politics of Extraordinary Names. 21. Vernacular Cannibalism: When a Big Language Monster Eats Up Smaller Ones. 22. Spectacles of Success and Failure. Thou Shall Be There, Nonetheless. 23. Ordinary Art and the Quest for Distorted Icons. 24. Lost and Found, Friends and Enemies, Buried in Ordinary Trousseau. 25. Living and Dying, Medicine and Songs, and Folk Philosophy. Index. 'A splendid work of art, In Defence of the Ordinary returns drama, pleasure and awakening to everyday life in the tradition of cultural critics like Ashis Nandy and Umberto Eco The book is one of a kind.' -Prathama Banerjee is a noted historian of the global south and Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. '[A] flaneur of our everyday spheres of life, [the author] excavates the multiple layers of social, political and artistic thinking and experimentation with an unparalleled lightness of prose worthy of a Balthasar Gracian and Georg Lichtenberg.' -Ramin Jahanbegloo is a philosopher and Vice Dean and Director at Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University, India. '[The] book builds an engaging web of thoughts about things which are ordinary but in their very ordinariness hide deep social truths Dev Nath Pathak brings a lightness to his critical eye while reminding us of how much of the ordinary has been forgotten in academic pursuits.' -Sundar Sarukkai is a renowned philosopher and thinker in contemporary India. In Defence of the Ordinary is laced with light humour, soaked in serious sarcasm and powered with poetic polemics. Informed by sources such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, yoga, anthropology, popular cinema, folk songs and everything that is part of an ordinary living, it is a sociologist's sincere ruminations on the layered ordinariness. The book invites us to rethink the ways of seeing, understanding, enacting, emoting and relating with provocative ideas like why we don't value ordinariness and how our pursuit of extraordinary is misleading us into mishaps. The key objective of the human existence is that of the book too, 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.…