From the arabian sands

January 2008

First things first. I got the feedback that my previous posts don’t carry a date and hence this blog suffers from the lack of a timeline. Well the only reason I dint include them earlier was coz I usually wrote them over a period of time – around 2-3 days and hence thought that tying a post to a particular date may distort things. But all the same I do see a point in the feedback and hence have decided to write the month before every post (as u can see above this). As for my previous posts I have done the same with them.

Its been quite a while since my last post and a lot of water has flown under the bridge since then. Firstly I write this from a foreign soil, and every gasp of my breath craves to go back to my motherland and smell the air of its soil. I really find it tough to believe sometimes that we human beings become so intricately attached to the stuff we grow with until at some point they become as good as soulmates to us.

Dubai is by all counts a mind blowing city . I would say it’s a case study in the human history of development. A perfect example of how to build a metropolis from virtually scratch out of sand. It competes with Singapore and to some extent Hong Kong and Tokyo (I still wouldn’t include Shanghai ) to be Asia’s global cities . But while Singapore has built itself inspite of the absence of any natural resources whatsoever Dubai has had the benefit of having tons of oil to itself and thereby enabling the administration to run the city on oxygen (without any tax payers money that is). But this doesn’t take away anything from this place. Afterall there are north African nations and even asian (ever heard of Brunei!!) floating in oil with the higher powers being among the richest on the planet but people go hungy there. But not Dubai. King Rashid is almost worshipped by the people here and he has lived up to it. He made sure that the money from oil was ploughed back into the system. You just have it all here. From the world’s costliest hotel to the world’s tallest tower to the world’s largest mall. Its all in the superlative. And all in the space of 35-40 years.

As for the people u find them all here. Hindi is everywhere and so are Indians (7 in 10). And somehow Filipinos go everywhere. Keralites with their usual ‘Yaai cyame tyu the middle yeast to yearn meney’. Enterprising people indeed. They are the single largest community here.

But I don’t know why inspite of all this the mind wants to go back to India. There is nothing like India in the whole world. Indeed home is where the heart is !!!