Veena Das' Life and is an attempt to capture how major 'events' reside in the corners of everyday life. Drawing primarily on the aftermath of the partition of India in 1947 and the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, Das explores how violence leaves its mark on the people it touches, how it affects them immediately and how it is transmitted. various forms of memory and silence in their daily lives. Das also points out that the way the nation-state has processed and constructed the violent events also shapes the moments preceding and following the violence, as well as the ways in which these events inhabit everyday life. The relationship between the event and the everyday is understood in terms of how a number of dichotomous factors, related to the internal and external, interact and influence each other. By blurring the lines between the ordinary and the eventful, Das is able to provide meaningful insight into the interface between the individual and the collective, between self and other, and between the everyday and the event. To better understand these relationships, Das undoes the stereotype of the detached and indifferent researcher and explores how events and the people affected by them change ways of seeing things, as well as her own perceptions; making his ethnography a kind of autobiography. The time spent with the participants leads Das to undertake explorations in the realm of inner and outer interaction, through an understanding of the relationships between singularity of lives, self versus other, collective versus individual, event versus everyday. However, Das does not view these ideas as dichotomous; instead, they are considered in relation to each other and are therefore clearer relationships...... middle of paper ......; interpersonal relationships are defined, colored, colored by the event. The powerful influence that the event has on everyday life comes from its capacity to change the dynamic between the individual and the collective and the dynamic between self and other. Das's insistence on the contingencies of the individual and the collective, the self and the other. the other, the everyday and the event, makes life essential reading for students and specialists in collective violence. It reminds us that the devil of "world-annihilating violence" really lies in the details and, therefore, that understanding how an event and violence resides in the everyday and in oneself must also be a matter of particular and careful analysis . Veena. Life and: Violence and descent into the ordinary. University of California Press, 2007.