Dubai Trip

So finally I did travel :) And this time, it was to Dubai. It was my first trip west of India. And I was mighty excited. And Dubai was a lot of what I had expected. And in many ways it was very different too. For starters, Dubai's economy isn't driven by oil. In fact only 15-20% of GDP was because of Oil. The oil is mostly in Abu Dhabi. Dubai is much like Singapore, driven by service sector.

The 2008 recession hit Dubai hard with exodus of a lot of expatriates. From articles I have read, people would drive their car to the airport, buy one way ticket and exit Dubai, leaving their Ferrari's and Prado in the parking lot. Dubai experienced a construction boom in 2003-2008, with buildings coming up at breakneck speed. The speculative market in housing prices and rentals fuelled the boom, and when the crash came, it bankrupted a huge percentage of population. Dubai, basically went bankrupt and Abu Dhabi had to step in to pay the debts. So much so that the tallest tower in Dubai - the Burj Khalifa was initially called Burj Dubai (or Dubai towers) but the name was changed to Burj Khalifa after the Abu Dhabi ruler who paid for the tower's completion in 2008.

Dubai is a man made city built on barren land with buildings, offices, malls dotting the entire landscape. The closest one can get to India is Gurgaon- albeit a well planned one. The land is barren but it is simply buildings and lands and roads and a productive and thriving economy. So in essence Dubai per se has no natural landscape (it does have a desert and a coast), but its man-made landscape is no less impressive and inspiring. Dubai in my opinion is a great example of sheer willpower to create something big. Malls in Dubai reek of opulence. The newer part of Dubai with its glittering malls, offer the best brands from across the world. If it is present in London, Milan, New York Paris or Shanghai, it is here in Dubai. Dubai is an expatriate dominated population with only 20-25% of population being local.

Thus, you find Argentinean cuisines in this small city which you wouldn't find that easily in say a Singapore. Not only in terms of cuisines and brands but the malls try and bring every possibly experience to Dubai so that you have absolutely nothing to complain. The Dubai mall, had a giant aquarium where you can go diving - beat that.. and the Emirates mall has a huge indoor ski resort, where you can go skiing . Whoa!

To give you a measure of Dubai's wealth - These are gold ATMS. ATMs that dispense Gold Bars. hah :)

It gets so hot for 6-7 months a year that one has to spend time indoors and malls seem are the ideal hangout spots. I should say that the malls weren't a novelty factor for me, given that Singapore is also quite similar, but then it was fun as a tourist. The most enjoyable part of the trip for me was meeting the brand manager I had been working with over the last few months over phone and emails. He is from Pakistan. He is extremely well read and knowledgeable. We got along absolutely fab when we met. It was such a stimulating and mind opening conversation just to hear narratives of events that we are contemporary witnesses, yet from an completely new perspective - a perspective that is steeped in a different set of experiences and consciousness. I am not talking about the clichéd topic of India Pakistan and Kashmir. We spent few hours talking about the Middle east, Pakistan, perceptions of India, the unrest in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and other regions, the local customs, global politics, oil economics and so on.

He was narrating a story of how when he and his colleague ( an NRI Indian and Hindu) were travelling in Egypt on work, the local Egyptians were very fascinated and excited due to presence of a Hindu. They started asking her questions on Hinduism and its customs etc. She was struggling to answer and the brand manager stepped in explained to the Egyptians in detail about Hinduism and its tenets. I sat there listening to him in wonder on his depth of knowledge and more importantly in admiration of his nature to learn and know more and more.

One of the biggest learning for me from this trip was that Pakistan and the people of Pakistan are more Indian than I had ever imagined. Well, that may not be the right articulation, but what I mean to say is that I really understood why Pakistan is included as part of 'sub continent'. Why both of us call ourselves 'Desis'. Pakistan has little in common with Middle-East. Even the language Urdu is closer to Hindi and is very very different from Arabic- so much so that two native Urdu and Arabic speakers cannot understand each other easily. Cricket and Bollywood are huge in Pakistan and my colleagues from Pakistan quoted movies and songs and dialogues from movies across the decades.

In our team on a particular day, there were three Pakistanis in the meeting and later that evening we stepped out for a team dinner. And boy did the three of them get into 'mood'. For close to 45 min, the three of them (including the brand manager) took turns to belt out 'Sher and Shaayari and qawwalis'.

I sat there mesmerized. They had couplets for every mood, every emotion and every situation. And it wasn't just a two line chorus but the full length easily running into 10-12 lines. Brillianto!

Overall, I really enjoyed my trip to Dubai. In the last 7-8 months that I have been out of India, there is one thing that I have learnt from my personal observation of people especially Indians. When Indians move out of India, they tend to converge together and hanging out with Indians. And if there are plenty of Indians then they tend to hang out with Indians from their part of the country etc. I call this the ghetto-isation. I completely understand this mindset - we create islands of familiarity in a new environment where similarity is seen as a reaffirmation of some form of kinship. However, many a times we are so steeped in this mentality that we miss out the experiences of local culture, people that can provide us some incredibly new stimuli and learning experiences that can really broaden our horizons. From simple reading of books to experimenting with cuisines to visiting museums to engaging in conversations with other nationalities can be such an enriching experience.