Well, it turns out that we would not have missed much at all.. giving it a skip. As you enter Dubai - the first thing you do notice... is the concrete jungle filled with sky scrapers and malls... ('malls' may not give you a sense of size - a normal mall multiplied by 100 would come close to the size of Dubai mall... this is just one of the many). The Dubai mall had more shop attendants than customers... there was the famed Dubai Shopping festival ongoing...
Anyway.. the whole place looked very surreal to me... If you visit the city with eyes open – the truth is hidden in plain view, behind the glitter and glamour of the place.. you see more servants.. more maids, workers and poor laborers on the building sites (all from the Indian subcontinent) than Arabs... None looking all that happy. We did see some rich Emiratis in their white dresses being driven by Indian drivers in Porsches, Mercs, BMWs and Rolls Royces... The undercurrent I felt was - South Asians were not looked upon as equals in Dubai. Some research later did confirm this after fact.
The place... seemed more like Albert Speer was reborn to build commercial castles for modern day Walt Disney... The multitude of sky scrapers had big screaming 'TO-LET', 'FOR SALE' or 'CALL FOR LEASE' signs.. written in BIG..BOLD letters (each letter looked like covering 3 - 4 floors to me..). Most roads have unfinished sky scrapers with workers teeming to complete them in that scorching heat... wonder why the hurry to add one more unoccupied sky scrapper...
The friendly taxi driver (South Asian again... a little research on Google later confirms that the population in Dubai is indeed 50%+ South Asian - Emiratis' make up less than 15% of the population).....was more than happy to talk about the desert revolution - how he has seen the desert bloom in past 15 years... On top of Burj Khalifa (at 160 floors - this dwarfs the other buildings around.... wonder if even 5% of this structure is occupied...) - you get to see the other sky scrapers like Gulliver would have seen the Liliputs....so many.. every where... you even see a 'Before' and 'Now' picture on walls at the observation deck showing how Dubai looked 15 years back and now... made me wonder how on earth could someone build this concrete jungle in the wide vast desert.... what was the need? Who are they building it for? 15% Emiratis living there? Are they trying to turn this place into a commercial nerve center in the middle east - is that needed at all? Deep inside - it struck me hard.. how money can make people try to fight nature... could money turn Dubai into Las Vegas / Singapore? For how long?
Dubai - 1990 v/s 2013
Where do they get so much water to pump up 160 floors on Burj Khalifa.... or 100 floors... or even 20 floors... every building around seemed like 20+ floors to me (turns out that there are over 200 sky scrapers in Dubai)... Water, after-all is more costly than Petrol there... During its peak in mid 2000's- 1/5th of cranes worldwide were in Dubai - its afterall a small place: a little Googling tells me that the State of Dubai is smaller that our city of Mysore (or any level 2 City in India - in terms of land mass).. how on earth do they even get to build these structures... who builds them??... the posters all around in Dubai will make us believe that the Ruler Sheikh Mohammed has built this city.. Turns out that the vast majority of the concrete structure gets built by teeming underpaid workers from India, Pakistan / Bangladesh.... one gets to hear about the scamsters luring people to go to Dubai / Middle-East in smaller towns of India in exchange for large sums of upfront visa 'fees' / facilitation money - did not seem impossible to me that they get lured to work in these mammoth construction sites.... we did walk past some construction site filled with Indian laborers.... felt a slight tinge in my heart.
Dubai went on the verge of bankruptcy in 2009... big brother Abu Dhabi saved them from defaulting their Dubai World loan. Seems like a time bomb ticking... with all those empty buildings and the empty malls.... seems like Dubai is headed for a hard crash...
Wonder how long can the lights be lit on the sky scrapers and water be pumped in those artificial islands.. and in those landscaped golf courses and multitudes of parks when Oil Money runs out. After all.. Oil will not last forever.. not even for big brother Abu Dhabi..
How much waste. What for and for how long? This money could have been easily put to better use. With much less human suffering. Something reminds me of that beautiful poem from Percy B. Shelley -
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
Ciao till next time...Harsha
4 comments:
Good one, Harsha - let them waste the money, than donate to terrorist organizations. i doubt if they have the sense to put it to better use of alleviating human suffering.
This is an eye opener to me.
I had altogether a different perception of Dubai as seen from the airport.
Thnx for comments guys. Well... things can be interpreted in different ways. This is how I saw it. It could be right, or it could be wrong. Short periods of time spent somewhere cannot give a holistic view - but, the under current of something being eerily out of place made me write about it...
Nice Article Harsha!!
Keep it up
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