'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] flâneur 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 Gracián 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.
Dev Nath Pathak teaches Sociology at South Asian University and is a founding faculty member of the university's Department of Sociology. His current research interests include popular culture (music, cinema and performance) and South Asian studies. He is Reviews Editor of Society and Culture in South Asia (the journal of Department of Sociology, South Asian University, co-published with SAGE India). Some of his recent publications include Living & Dying: Meanings in Maithili Folklore (2018), Another South Asia! (2018), Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (co-edited, 2017) and Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (co-edited, 2018).
