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Packaging Life Pramod K. Nayar

Pramod K. Nayar takes up four aspects of everyday life and unwraps them for us in Packaging Life ( www.sagepublications.com). He lays out life in four editions – low-calorie, deluxe, bubble-wrapped, and high-speed – to correspond, respectively, to our cultures of health, comfort, risk and mobility. We live in an age when health is in fashion, the author declares in the ‘low-calorie’ ch apter. Move on to the ‘deluxe’ chapter, on comfort, ‘the most pervasive and visible cultural logic of consumer culture today,’ despite being located between necessity and luxury. Whether it is housing or air travel, furniture or food, comfort is the demand and condition that is emphasised in marketing products and services. The next chapter, the ‘bubble-wrapped’ one on risk, opens with alarming news snatches, about the AIDS threat, water-borne diseases, ‘Himalayan meltdown,’ and computer virus! The culture of ‘mobility’ with which the book wraps up is all about moving. Mobility is sought after, desired and projected as a desirable condition of human life, Nayar informs.

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