A Note from a Busy Oasis

Didn’t plan on it but a few weeks back, the day-job boss got a client based out of Dubai and as things would have it, we were required to head to Dubai and so, I’m here taking advantage of the hotel’s lap top to try and get the writing juices flowing after several days of heavy data entry activities.

Dubai is a special place for me. My stepdad, Lee was sent to Dubai in the late 1990s to set up the agency of what was then known as Lintas. As a result of his posting, Dubai became the first place in the Arabian Gulf that I visited. On my first trip there, Lee went out of his way to ensure that my sister and I got the full “Arabian” experience, which included a camel safari (which was run by a couple from Bognar Regis and their Pakistani workers). On the second visit, he had hired a maid who happily took us to discover the sights and sounds on souks and malls, the two places that the GCC region in known for.

My life in Singapore took an unusual turn around 12-years ago when I got sent to Riyadh as part of the Saudi Embassy’s delegation to prepare for the visit to the late Crown Prince Sultan to Singapore, which was the underlying fact in the turn my life has taken.

For some strange reason, blessings and salvation have always come from those of Indian Origin or Muslims (my current day-job boss being both). This tie with the Indian Subcontinent and the Arabian world is such that the only languages that make me feel that there is an emotional tie are the languages that I don’t speak, namely Arabic and Hindi-Urdu (the languages that I actually can communicate in being English by a long way, German in a distant second and Cantonese and Mandarin if I am pushed to. These are languages that I can use but I don’t feel anything special about them in the same way that I don’t feel anything special about the fingers typing these words).

So, you could say that Dubai could be an emotionally good city for me, in as much as it’s filled with the two groups of people who have blessed me and there is something very comforting with starting every conversation with “As-Salaam-Alaikum ” (Incidentally, the familiarity with using Salaam was easily translated to Shalom Aleichiem when dealing with the Jews).

Dubai like Singapore is a curious match of East and West and Old and New. On one hand the city is built to impress. Dubai, like the rest of the GCC is obsessed with shopping malls. The mall, is the centre of life and Dubai is on a mission to build the biggest this or that. I had my second visit to the Dubai Mall (described by my Evil Teen as –“Boring Sia,”) and seen the Burj Khalifa (so named after the cousin in Abu Dhabi, who bailed them out of the financial crisis). Dubai is filled with outrageous opulence. You can even get “booze” here – I had managed to get my beer in a nearby lounge with Indian and Nepali dancing girls and there is even “naughtier” entertainment in the “spas” that fill four-star hotels. My fellow traveler said Dubai was looking like New York – I beg to differ, New York would love to have Dubai’s buildings and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills looks like a rats nest next to some of the swankier parts of town.

Yet, I seem to have aged in as much as these are not the things that I aspire to. There are only so many shopping malls that the system can manage, which was a point that my Saudi tour guide didn’t quite get – why do you travel so many thousands of miles to see more of the same.

What I liked about Dubai was found in the Gold Souk, where merchants from all over the world came to haggle over that most glamorous of commodities – Gold. I liked the fact that the Pakistanis and Arabs dressed traditionally and went about their business as they may have had several years ago. I enjoyed watching Nigerian tourist complain that the shops were using the “wrong” currency rate (why use 100 – use 99 – the difference of 1 Naiara being negligible in most other currencies).

If you ask me what Dubai has gotten right, it is the fact that the “trader” is celebrated. Traders are the people who make the world prosper. Traders make goods and services move and they create markets. A sensible government encourages that type of activity. Hustling is a noble activity that feeds people – it was one of the attractions of Hanoi – people were poor but they were not begging – they were trying to hustle you.

It’s something that I never quite understood about Singapore. We are a trading hub and I could never understand why “trader” was considered a “derogatory” word. Lee Kuan Yew famously wrote, “Our people were not entrepreneurs – they were traders.” Erm, it’s quite clear that Old Man Lee didn’t quite understand – entrepreneurs are traders.

Dubai is an odd ball in the Middle East. It’s a place that has created a reasonable economy and outrageous sums of money without using oil (not that it had much of it in the first place). When you think about it, that’s an achievement. Dubai has been smart in being open to trade and hustling. It’s something we should go back to in Singapore. We were a nation built by trade and we should be proud of being traders rather than bureaucrats. A trader can survive without a bureaucrat. The bureaucrat cannot survive without the trader. It’s something we need to look at.