The engine of the black Corvette revved to a gasket-popping roar. Its driver leant out of his window. He was dressed in traditional Arab robes but wore a rubber wizard’s mask. He held an aerosol aloft and directed a jet of party foam into the air. Four-wheel drives plastered in pictures of Dubai’s Royal Family roared their engines back in approval. The cacophony was deafening.
On the opposite carriageway smoke billowed from the spinning back wheels of a new Land Cruiser as the driver pressed the brakes and floored the accelerator. This was the favourite way for many of the fervently patriotic and car crazy Emiratis to mark National Day in Dubai this week, the 38th anniversary of the founding of the United Arab Emirates, and one of the biggest celebrations of the year.
A mile away at the new Marina Yacht Club, Western expats were also working their way into a party mood. Deferential Filipino staff served a foamy lobster broth as an amuse bouche between courses. Beer and cocktails loosened tongues and a knot of dancers formed in front of the band. Tens of millions of pounds worth of powerboats bobbed at their moorings beneath the revelry on the terrace. Behind the boats a dozen skyscrapers framed the view, a few of the lights in their thousands of flats were on. “It’s so beautiful here,” said a pretty young Anglo-Indian woman clutching a large glass of chilled white wine and taking in the scene.
Welcome to the modern equivalent of the last days of Rome. The failure of Dubai World, one of the Emirate’s flagship companies, to honour a debt due last month has rocked this city state to its foundations. By any conventional logic Dubai is now a busted flush…MORE
Reply to the article Schools to fly flag and play anthem published by The National. source…
“Raising the flag and playing the national anthem are a must for students when attending school because it reflects their national sentiments towards their nation, leadership and land,” Mr. al Qattami said in a statement issued by WAM, the state news agency It’s an interesting statement and a statement that embodies in its self a silent yet a very prominent reality of this country. Let me undo this jigsaw puzzle for you rather than putting the piece together. He talks about a national anthem and in this anthem there lay a verse “My country, my country, my country, my country” Whose country it this really? Is it my country cause I have lived here all my life and still need a visa or is it the country of the south Indian worker carrying glass for the windows of the skyscrapers to make this country glittery yet he as to go on a strike for his meek little pay or is this a country of those people who get the jobs where the only requirements they need to fulfill is “Only UAE nationals may apply”. This country defiantly is a country for those who can afford it. It has plenty to offer in its malls, its night clubs and its expensive developments. It has the most lit up highways for its people to enjoy. Only for those who can pay.
The anthem also says “Each of us swears to build you and work for you. Our work is pure, we work in purity” whose work are we talking about? And if work is so highly valued that it merits a mention in the anthem surly work has to be rewarded. Rewarded with the states of being an expatriate no matter what. Rewarded with deportation or rewarded with a ban after having a falling out with your employer.
I have sung this anthem all my school life and never once has the national sentiment towards this nation its leadership or even its land been evoked as I have always been an expatiate and always will be. Every time I wanted to say “Oh my homeland” I was reminded the expiry date of my visa. Every time the sentiment stimulated I was compartmentalized in one of the several boxes labeled Pakistani, Indian, Bengali, etc. I was never accepted as a part of the local community, the emarati community.
Never once welcomed with open arms and a smile instead was subjected to live like a Jew or a Christian in my own Islamic land. instead subjected to pay dhimmi. This literally means responsibility of protection. Protection from whom, from other neighboring Islamic countries. Protection from Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan…
lastly all that i can say to Mr. al Qattami and the leadership and the people of this nation. I am a Muslim expatriate from past 25 years now with an outsider or a refugees way of life living in an Islamic country forced to sing for a nation that will never be mine and wave a flag that will never see me worthy enough of defending its honor its dignity.
A new year dawns, and with it some big changes for Lola LebCan. After many happy years in Sheikh Zayed Road’s prestigious Orifice Towers building, Dubai’s PR queen is being forced to pack her bags. Either that, or have thousands of labourers gaze at her naked splendour in the shower every morning as the new Dubai Metro whizzes right past her window.
But like many long-term expats, Dubai has palled for Lola. The once-glittering heights of SZR’s skyscrapers are but dusty glass. The glamourous sandlands social whirl is a shallow chore. There is no joy, no inspiration and the city, Lola says, is “soulless”. She has even swapped karaoke at Harry Ghatto’s for this festive lament:
Deck the malls with discount banners Fallah-lalala-lala-lala
‘tis the season to sell your hummers Fallah-lalala-lala-lala
Donning now your old pyjamas Fallah-lalala-lala-lala
Join the bankrupt Jumeira mamas Fallah-lalala-lala-lalaaaa*
Two years ago, Lola fled to Egypt for sanctuary. She now plans to seek the healing waters of the Nile once more and work on her Masri twang. Plus there are around 40 million men in Egypt, compared to just 2.5 million in the UAE.
Dubai has made the cover of Newsweek, but not in a good way!
In her classic account of World War I, Barbara Tuchman sets the scene for the passing of the prewar era with a vision of epochal pomp, the funeral of Britain’s King Edward VII. Nine monarchs rode in the procession and the pageantry evoked “gasps of admiration,” wrote Tuchman. But when it was over, one British peer reflected that “all the old buoys which have marked the channel of our lives seem to have been swept away.”
In Dubai last month, a very different kind of pageant was held, but if Tuchman were still around she’d have been taking notes. This triumph was billed as a world-beating blowout, a $20 million star-smacked extravaganza with the likes of Charlize Theron, Lindsay Lohan, Michael Jordan, and Robert De Niro in attendance. The fireworks display was so enormous it could only truly be appreciated from the heavens (literally—it was visible from space). The occasion was the opening of the $1.5 billion Atlantis resort complex on an enormous artificial archipelago shaped like a palm tree. The point of the party, its promoters explained, was to show the world that Dubai is a land of fantasies come true, an over-the-top destination for good times. But among many of the guests, the mood was funereal. As the fireworks exploded, the global economy was imploding. Many of Dubai’s overleveraged fortunes were crumbling, and no one was sure where to turn. The old buoys seemed to have been swept away.
“It’s a tragedy in the making,” said a senior executive with one of the city’s biggest real-estate-development companies as he peered into his champagne. “A lot of people are going to get hurt. A lot of dreams are going to be shattered,” he said, referring not only to the erstwhile rich and the speculators. Imported workers are already being exported, jobless, back to their homes. Skyscrapers are standing unfinished, baking in the sun. “Have you seen all those ships lined up on the horizon?” he said, gesturing toward the open gulf. “They’re stuck out there full of steel and concrete nobody wants anymore.”
While it may be an exaggeration to say that as goes Dubai, so goes globalization, it has become hard to imagine one without the other. More than any other place on earth, this city-state in the United Arab Emirates is the creation of worldwide commerce, a specialty-built magnet for the kind of hot money that seeks the quickest, highest profits and then moves on when they disappear. A lot of that cash comes from nearby Arab oil powers, most notably the adjacent emirate of Abu Dhabi, which has 90 percent of the UAE’s crude. But many billions more have flowed in from Iran, India, China, Russia, Europe, the United States, and indeed just about every other corner of the world.
For the past decade at least, real-estate speculation has been the national sport. The price of houses and apartments, many not yet built, rose by 43 percent in the first quarter of this year alone. Mortgage money was easy to get and speculators commonly flipped properties for substantial profits in a matter of weeks, sometimes even days, before the first monthly payments came due. Everybody wanted in on the game. “Employees didn’t focus on their work anymore,” complains the chairman of a regional transport company. “They all wanted to go buying property for 10 percent down, if that.” As of June, Dubai had 42 million square feet of office space under construction, more than any other city in the world, even Shanghai. What was a flat desert 20 years ago is today an urban canyon. Such is the frenzy that the Hard Rock Café, built among vacant lots in 1997, is now surrounded by skyscrapers—and plans to tear it down for another high-rise are being debated as if the Hard Rock were a heritage site.
But Dubai wasn’t just a receiver of world capital. It was also an important global investor. In 2006, its DP World acquired the management of six major U.S. container ports—until an explosion of xenophobic protest in Congress made the deal politically untenable. Today, among many other holdings, Dubai owns a 43 percent share in NASDAQ OMX and a 20.6 percent share in the London Stock Exchange. Its wholly owned subsidiaries include Travelodge in Britain, Mauser in Germany, and Barney’s and Loehmann’s in New York. By early 2005 the “liquidity gift,” or windfall profit, created by rapidly rising oil prices started to look like it would last, and Dubai’s boom really picked up steam. Some of the city’s top financial officials started warning privately that a bubble was forming and so sought to keep diversifying their holdings as widely as possible. But as oil prices continued to climb, more and more fresh cash poured into Dubai’s freewheeling economy and the public started to feel protected from global shocks. Nobody was ready for the plunge in prices over the past four months, which has taken oil down to less than a third of its price last summer. Dubai turned out to be “insulated but not isolated,” says Mary Nicola, an economist with Standard Chartered Bank… READ THE FULL STORY
been taking notes. This triumph was billed as a world-beating blowout, a $20 million star-smacked extravaganza with the likes of Charlize Theron, Lindsay Lohan, Michael Jordan, and Robert De Niro in attendance. The fireworks display was so enormous it could only truly be appreciated from the heavens (literally—it was visible from space). The occasion was the opening of the $1.5 billion Atlantis resort complex on an enormous artificial archipelago shaped like a palm tree. The point of the party, its promoters explained, was to show the world that Dubai is a land of fantasies come true, an over-the-top destination for good times. But among many of the guests, the mood was funereal. As the fireworks exploded, the global economy was imploding. Many of Dubai’s overleveraged fortunes were crumbling, and no one was sure where to turn. The old buoys seemed to have been swept away.
