There are few things as aggravating in life as being stuck bumper-to-bumper on the Abu Dhabi to Dubai road, traffic snarled and no way out. Times like that get my brain conjuring fantasy escape routes – such as my car sprouting wings and floating above the mayhem. Recently, I was trapped in a just such [...]
read morePerhaps the fact that none of the women on The National’s business desk received the invitation to Cityscape Abu Dhabi’s “ladies only” session last Wednesday should have been a harbinger. I found out about it only when one of my colleagues, a Mr Rupert Wright – whom nobody would mistake for a lady – forwarded [...]
read moreOn any given day, you might find Mohan Jashanmal outside one of his family’s stores, perhaps the one at Abu Dhabi Mall. Clad in a khandoura and traditional Emirati headscarf, the India native greets passersby, urging them to come in and have a look around. He ignores the chagrined store manager who is beseeching him [...]
read moreThe folks at the Laureus World Sports Awards might have assumed that by persuading the likes of Hugh Grant and Gwyneth Paltrow to show up to the Emirates Palace, they had the upper hand in Abu Dhabi’s swoon quotient. But for me, the main attraction turned out to be across the emirate on Yas Island [...]
read moreBrocas Burrows was just another expatriate executive seeking a sun-splashed fortune in Dubai in September 2008. Mr Burrows’s company, Platinum Vision, builds high-end home automation systems, the sort of thing that opens blinds, sets the air-conditioning, lowers the lights to a setting marked “romantic”, all at the touch of a mobile phone. It was a [...]
read moreA better mind than mine said that if we don’t remember history we’re doomed to repeat it. It seems that, now, we don’t even allow our foolish mistakes enough time to become history before we repeat them. Consider a flier I recently came across for an “exclusive offer” from Emirates Bank. Beneath a photo of [...]
read moreThe untitled painting by Laxman Shreshtha caught my eye. The placid greys of the background contrasted with the reds and oranges in the young girl’s scarf. In profile, she looked a bit wistful, as if she had just realised the loss of innocence required for adult life. And the price was right: bidding would start [...]
read moreWhen Lisa Steel waited on tables as a teenager, she never used a notebook to take customer orders. It was not because she wanted to show off. She was illiterate. “I had it all in my head. I’d walk back into the kitchen and someone else would write it down,” Ms Steel says. “I had [...]
read moreNot many people think turning 40 is good news. But for Ines Scotland it was cause for celebration. Hitting the Big Four-O made it easier for her to get permission to enter Saudi Arabia for business. “I immediately applied for my multiple-entry visa,” she says, laughing. “It seems you’re considered ‘no longer desirable’, and I [...]
read morePerhaps it should not have come as a surprise that Nassim Nicholas Taleb, having agreed to an interview, would then go silent. After all, the core idea in his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is expecting the unexpected. “The world we live in,” he says, “is vastly different from the [...]
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