November 22, 2007
Dubai built it and the world did come
Column on the Financial Times comment page.
My epiphany about the Gulf state of Dubai came one night last week in the Souk Madinat Jumeirah. I was standing in the local franchise of Trader Vic’s, the Californian Hawaiian-themed bar, with a Mai Tai cocktail in hand, watching people dance to a salsa band.
I was with a bunch of visitors and locals, some of them consultants at McKinsey & Co, which has a large office in Dubai, as have many European and US banks and legal firms. One of the group was from Spain, another from Venezuela and a third from South Africa. Rounding it out were Americans whose parents were variously born in Jordan, Pakistan and Taiwan.
It felt as if I had died and gone to expatriate heaven.
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“When will the (Dubai) bubble burst?” This question has been regularly asked from the time Queen Elizabeth ‘cut the ribbon’ at the Dubai World Trade Centre (1977 I think it was); (’who’s going to occupy the 33 floors’?), through the criticisms of the sceptics at the announcement of the development of Jebel Ali (’why would anyone bother setting-up a facility in Jebel Ali’?), to the ‘disbelief’ of the ‘Palm Developments’ (’no one is going to buy property in Dubai’), and most recently, the scoffing at the announcement of the development of the world’s largest airport with a capacity of 120 million passengers per annum, and which is just ONE ELEMENT of the ‘World City’ project!
Posted by: Bharat Jashanmal | November 24th, 2007 at 8:28 am | Report this commentThe critics (those of yesterday and today), are by-in-large individuals and or institutions that think conventionally, and the one thing that no one can accuse Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid of, is conventional thinking!