Glocal is the new buzzword for the loveless mating of the local with the global. As the pressures on them to get integrated into the world market grow, most societies scurry to adjust themselves to the external forces that are changing the texture of politics, economy, culture and lifestyles everywhere. What they have to cope with is not a second or third shock but a whole series of upsets and the experience is often disorienting. The union of the global and the local is a mismatch in most cases and what it produces is a variety of hybrid social theories and practices. The question what happens to a society as it goes glocal does not therefore permit of a straight answer. The response differs from case to case depending on the reach of the globalization process, the material and moral resources of the society concerned, the strength of its tradition, the degree of its political integration and its capacity for innovation and managing change without compromising its identity or integrity. Some third world countries have become derelict because of their dismal failure to meet or even comprehend the challenges of glocalization. Many have barely managed a rate of economic growth just a notch above that of the increase in their population. Even the few which have reached new levels of prosperity have done little to empower their people. Francisco Goya, the famous Spanish painter, once said that the sleep of reason produced monsters. The irony of the ongoing technological revolution, which holds in thrall the elite groups in most developing societies, is the way an excess of rationality, with dramatic advances in science, rising productivity levels and instant communication, is spawning a new breed of demons. Fundamentalist terrorism infecting many parts of the world is one of them. The process which has forced many third world societies to descend from poverty into destitution is another. Many changes in the global scene have a mongrel look, carrying as they do imprints of disparate forces at work. No new or old left theory can explain, for instance, the paradox of China's long-drawn-out affair with a market economy under the auspices of a communist party. Liberal thinkers in the West, who never tire of pointing to the close connection between a free enterprise economy and political democracy, are at a loss to account for the fact that all the east Asian tigers, held up as models of development for the rest of the third world, achieved their 'miracle' under authoritarian regimes. Contrary to the Marxist prognosis, what would make the capitalist system yield place to socialism in the end was the irresolvable contradiction between the means and relations of production in the advanced industrial countries. In fact what ails most affluent societies today is the continuing rise in productivity levels which, on the one hand, brings a crazy variety of goods in the market much in excess of effective demand and, on the other, greatly reduces the number of job opportunities. Thus ever higher levels of consumption in large segments of hi-tech societies go hand in hand with increasing unemployment. The result has been to make Keynesianism in these countries as dated as Marxism, forcing even social democratic governments to roll back the welfare state. The new contradiction which has developed at the heart of affluent societies can, however, provide little comfort to the third world, large parts of which are in a much worse predicament. For, the problems of poor societies are extremely low, not high, levels of productivity, and chronic shortages of food, shelter and education and health facilities, not a glut of goods and services. They also suffer because of a widening gulf between the elite and the mass of the people, a proliferation of group identities which finds expression in rising incidence of violence in public life and rapid decay of the institutions of both state and civil society. Unfortunately, most third world analysts of the global scene, hidebound by defunct ideologies, have not been able to look at the new processes at work with greater penetration for lack of a perspective more appropriate to the post-Cold War, post-Fordist, post-Marxist and post-modernist era. The truth is that the dynamics of a capitalism, which has grown far more assertive after the collapse of all command economies, is based on fostering ever new needs that in turn demand a steady increase in spending on goods and services available in the market. In other words, the very survival of the new system depends on a continuously expanding market and spread of consumerism. The passion with which the newly rich even in third world societies have taken to consumerist values is wholly in accord with this logic. If the swinging time some of them have is not unmixed with anxiety, it is because the reform process at home is still subject to periodical ups and downs, the infrastructure remains woefully inadequate, the spread of rot in the political culture continues unabated and the requisite cohesion in the ruling class to manage change with celerity is conspicuous by its absence even in the face of a rising tide of mass discontent. The medium may or may not be the message. Yet, it is certainly the most efficient means of making consumerism replace all other ideologies. The other -ism that comes with it as a bonus is cynicism seen in the growing indifference of affluent societies as well as individuals to the suffering of their poor neighbours. It is hard otherwise to comprehend the increasing space the media devote to dissemination of news about new luxury goods and services even when millions of people have very often to go without basic amenities. It is cynicism again which is at the root of the new trend in Western philosophy to dismiss as nonsensical all questions that fall outside the parameters of everyday speech and which have been of the utmost concern to all civilizations in the past. Its all too obtrusive presence can also be seen in the work of many post-modernist thinkers who incur much expense of spirit in ferreting out hidden contradictions in every philosophical or literary text they study and undermining the idea of a stable meaning. In a globalization reader I happened to go through recently I was taken aback by a short piece by Serge Halami carrying the provocative heading: 'When market journalism invades the world'. The writer goes straight to the question that seems to have been bugging him. He begins with the query: 'What should we - journalists and intellectuals - do in a world where 338 billionaires have more assets than the combined income of nearly half of the planet's population? And who dominates the political system which becomes the system?' The honest answer to his question is that the groups he addresses happen to be parts of the very system he is castigating. Why should journalists and intellectuals have the arrogance to regard themselves as a class apart in a world where even art, music and philosophy are market driven? It was the market which made bowdlerized versions of existentialism into a saleable commodity in the early post-war period and turned Jean- Paul Sartre into a cult figure. It is again because of the yen for novelty promoted by the market that fashions in philosophical thought change as fast as those in clothes. In the last five decades alone the vogue for existentialism first gave way to that for structuralism and then post-structuralism and modernity made room for post-modernity. Of late more brands of both New Left and New Right have been on sale than ever before. The intellectuals are by no means immune to the virus of false consciousness. They are indeed in some ways more vulnerable than the common people who have no use for pure theory and judge an ideology by the practices of those who claim a monopoly on it. After all there were thousands of intellectuals who had no qualm in condoning Stalinist terror or buying the myth of the Cultural Revolution which claimed millions of lives. In democratic societies, many intellectuals have no hesitation in becoming a part of the establishment if given the chance. When Bill Clinton asked Amartya Sen at a recent conference at White House what he would do with a billion dollars or two if given that money, the eminent economist gave the stock reply that he would invest it in education and healthcare. It would have been more to the point if he had gone on to say something about the increasing number of educated unemployed in the third world and ask the United States president what prevented his administration from making access not only to education but also to a decent livelihood a part of its rhetoric as well as action in support of human rights. Maybe he wanted to play safe and avoid the troubled ground where the local encounters the global, sometimes in the hope of a better future but more often in fear and trembling.