Dubai rarely puts me in a receptive mood. I don’t know if it is the same for everyone, but I don’t notice as much minutia when I am in this, my current home city. This could simply be my senses shutting down due to lack of stimulation, because in spite of all the glitter and hype, Dubai is still a proto-city that lacks real character. When I’m in Bombay the assault on my brain is such that my consciousness expands to take it all in, and there is an almost surreal cognition of the strangest insignificant detail on a crowded street. Such insights rarely grace me when I’m living in Dubai.

It is not all hopeless. If you walk the streets of old Dubai, dive into its fragrant souqs, and get a taste of what this place is like below the surface, what it must have been like before the coming of the glass-fronted buildings and the too numerous sports cars at every street light, you sense a twinge of hope and also feel a sense of loss for a world that is being systematically destroyed by ruthless and thoughtless modernisation. You can sometimes feel the same twinge of greater things in a few of the modern developments, when you look around and realize that you are surrounded by people from a hundred different lands all carefully ignoring the stark but stunning display of lingerie in the latest Calvin Klein store front, but these occurrences are rarer than they should be. While the mass of differences mingle, this city has a way of getting them to average down to a lesser whole rather than rising to a harmonic crescendo.

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Yesterday I got on to a bus with nine members of a brass band. It all started with my favourite pastime in Mumbai, taking a bus towards the south of the city, the older more historical section of this sprawling metropolis. A red BEST (Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport) bus on route #85 is my staple ride. The old-style printed roll of fabric that acts as a changeable destination placard usually reads Hutatma Chowk, the post-independence revisionist title of the busy square in the centre of the old quarter that most people still simply refer to as Fountain.

Mumbai’s busses are one of the most efficiently organised mass transport systems you’re likely to come across anywhere in the world, and to maintain that efficiency the BEST company has set up depots and minor confluence points throughout the city where drivers and bus-conductors can be replaced, routes started, and other planning and routing tasks done. Part of this system involves getting busses that are somewhere across the city to a specific midpoint to keep with the plan. These are those rare occasions when some busses might not go where you expect them to.

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Today I loaded a 50 Kg drum of glue into a Porsche 911. Yes, you read right, I mean a real live Porsche 911 sports car, not an old beat up Toyota with a bumper sticker that says “My other car is a Porsche”. And no, I’m not giving up on design and writing and going into the manual labour market any time soon, but this is an interesting story anyway.

My Dad works in the field of industrial chemicals, and being the overly conscientious worker that he is, it is not unheard of for us to sometimes take a detour during his off hours to make some small but urgent delivery to one of his clients. It’s usually a bag or a few bottles of some of the more harmless stuff he deals in. This evening we set out on the mission to deliver a drum of food grade glue to a guy whose factory would come to a stand still without it. We arranged to meet him somewhere convenient and set off. I’m used to seeing some guy in a pickup truck or a normal saloon car take the delivery at these meetings, but this time was different. The person we were meeting was new in town and unfamiliar with the place, so a few quick exchanges on the phone later we were told to look for the Porsche in the parking lot. That piece of information didn’t really sink in until we pulled over next to a metallic silver Porsche 911 and the person at the wheel waved out to attract our attention.

Now, most of you are thinking, “Wow! A Porsche!”, but that was not the thing that had my attention. One of the sad side effects of living in Dubai is that you see too many super cars too often and seeing a Porsche is not really an occasion for surprise any more, at least when you drive around as much as we do. No, my concern was more in the area of, “How in blazes do you fit a drum into that car?”. We stopped, said hello to the young guy at the wheel and then things got more interesting: the drum we were carrying was not the smallish plastic 25 Kg version I was accustomed to seeing during these deliveries, instead it was a double sized 50 Kg model!
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I’ve been to Fujairah many times, for both work and pleasure. And I’ve been somewhere along the various roads that lead to Fujairah even more times than I can count or remember. Most people only know of one highway that leads up towards this northern Emirate, but I am familiar with several because we never stick to the beaten path. We are always on the lookout for a new twist in the tale or a new fork in the road.
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The concept of crashing a wedding, or any other large and noisy gathering of human beings for that matter, is very clear and well understood. The crasher tries to gain access to the said public gathering without the luxury of approval in the form of an invitation. So clear is this phenomenon in the minds of the general population that this complex social interaction has been reduced to a single representational term that is fathomed by even the most naive citizens of the world. They named a mass-market romantic comedy after it, for God’s sake. How complicated can it be?
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The listing in the newspaper sounded innocent enough:

EYE YOGA…
If you wish to get rid of your spectacles, attending Sampoorna Eye Yoga Camp can do it the natural way. The camp will teach you eye exercises, Vedic in origin, that will help in relieving you of eye disorders. Register for a free lecture in South Mumbai. On January 17. (Tel: 98xxxxxxxx)

My vision is quite normal and I don’t wear spectacles, but my brother and father do, and so this was of interest. We decided to go, and I went along for moral support, and for remembering any useful details as the member of the clan officially interested in this sort of thing.
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