Glocalised postmodern 'Jingle Bells'

(A fantabulous and thought-evoking version of a festive song created by two Indians, Nupur Bhargava and Amartya Rahut)

At a symposium in Portugal in 1996, Prof Philip Tagg, when presenting a paper on otherness and its problems in the study of popular music, commented that the term postmodern

had been adopted as a defeatist intellectual strategy by the kind of colleague who seems more set on wearing trendy conceptual garb on the catwalk of cultural studies (including musicology) than in shedding light on the mediation of ideologies in the modern mass media.

And he found otherness equally tricky.

I would like to add one more equally, if not worse, awkward term on the list—globalisation, together with its upgraded version glocalisation.

Having read tonnes of publications criticising such academic conceptual terms and in an effort to make life simple, I usually joke with my students by offering them some rules on how to apply these jargons to things around them.

Judging from your life experience,

1. In the circumstances where things, which should not be present at the same time, are sharply juxtaposed, it is postmodernism;
   
   
2. In the circumstances where things, which originally belong to the West (actually West Europe and North America only), are relocated in the East (wherever Near East, Middle East or Far East), it is globalisation;
   
   
3. In the circumstances where things in case 2 are not only relocated but also twisted to accommodate Eastern tastes, it is glocalisation.

Therefore, this Punjabi-style 'Jingle Bell' is a good example of postmodernism and glocalisation.

This YouTube clip has been around for more than one year. On this particular day, Christmas Eve, it is really appropriate to share it with readers of my weblog.