A central, if often neglected, aspect of globalization is its effect on time. Most typically, scholars argue that globalization has sped up the pace of life and some even propose a new temporal order: a 'timeless' or 'network' time that supplants or displaces 'natural' and pre-existing cycles (Harvey 1989;Hassan 2003;Virilio 2006). Castells (2000) writes of the general freeing of capitalism from the constraints of time, but this is only one part of the picture. Time is not dissolved in the global circuits of capital; ideologies of flexibility notwithstanding, there is considerable

This article explores how globalization is shaping the aspirations and identities of the Indian middle class and in particular those employed by the outsourcing industry. While these aspirations do not have a clearly defined object, they cluster around an idea of the West as the locus of modernity.The West's mystique derives, no doubt as it did in the colonial period, from the fact that it is the author of dramatic change. But this also prompts a certain anxiety among the middle class that such change is somehow corrupting. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in India, I argue that globalization does not herald an era of unprecedented personal freedom, a belated modernity, nor does it signify a crisis of the `traditional' Indian family. It is an Indian morality play where the pleasure principle clashes with the demands of custom and obligation, where kama (pleasure) and dharma (duty) meet in uneasy suspension.

Skin-lightening or 'fairness' creams -with their troubling colonial overtones -are big business in India, an over $200 million industry that comprises the largest segment of the country's skin cream market. Although corporations like Unilever have been widely criticized for profiting on colorism, they continue to produce advertisements that equate light skin with beauty, success, and empowerment. Through an analysis of the fairness motif in advertising and popular media, I first show how skin-lightening creams are positioned as alchemic agents of self-transformation. Secondly, as the use of skin lighteners continues to grow in the global South, I ask: how are we to understand this aspiration for lightness? Rather than viewing this kind of cultural mimicry as a form of false consciousness, I argue that it represents an anxious love for the 'other' that is conditioned by power relations.