PALORDINIA

So, after two consecutive days of trying to find a seat to watch the much anticipated MI4 I managed, with some friends, to book tickets and go watch the movie last night. It seems that, in Dubai, people felt an obligation to go watch the movie, since we all know that Dubai will be excessively featured in it. It is always interesting to see how Hollywood looks at you, and most often than not, they don’t disappoint and come up with some… errr.. nice surprises.

I have previously predicted on this blog that the movie will involve Tom Cruise jumping off Burj Khalifa. But I’m not going to cock-a-doodle-doo about it as, they tell me, it is not my style! And so, Tom Cruise being the producer of tho movie, decides to be unpredictably predictable and does it.

first things first. Before talking about what is important, let’s take the trivia out of the way. MI4, like any other movie in the series, revolves around some bad guys from that evil part of eastern Europe, plus a Swede -Maybe Anders Behring Breivik -, trying to bring the World as we know it to an end. This usually involves some sophisticated biological weapon with a stupid name. This time around, Tom Cruise is more direct and goes for the good ol’ Nuclear Weapon. You know, just to stay hip to what’s going on with Iran, Israel and Uncle Sam. Of course, as usual, he crashes some cars, jumps off some buildings, gets his bottom kicked, pulls on some masks, and assumes the identity of any high ranking official in the most advanced countries with ease, as you do. At the end of it he of course emerges triumphant with his team of usually two males and a female.

If you feel like leaving your brain at home and enjoy a night of improbable events, then this is a must-see movie.

But this is not why we went to see it, right? At least I didn’t. I wanted to see how Dubai is portrayed in the movie. There is always something magical about seeing the places you know in a movie. Of course this wouldn’t be the first time, but having a Hollywood blockbuster primarily shot in Dubai is a different experience. Hollywood is the most powerful weapon in the World. Yes, more powerful and destructive, if they want, than Nuclear Weapons. It also has an amazing reach, and what you see in this movie will be imprinted in your head as the most recent and reliable impression of the place. Especially, or should I see specifically, if you haven’t been to that place before.

Inside the theatre I saw people I never saw before in such places. Old Emiratis -my father’s old- who supposedly came to see what the buzz is all about, and how did their city look on the big screen. Reel Cinema flooded us with commercials before the movie started, and it seemed like every other store in Dubai Mall has sponsored the whole set up. This was really about Dubai. At least, in this part of the World.

As years go by I’m less inclined to believe anything I see in movies. You usually take things I’m talking about for granted. For example, In india, monkeys and cows are all over the place. In Mexico, they shoot people for fun. In Chicago you can kill half the neighborhood, set dozens of cars on fire and cross a hundred red lights without a cop in sight. You actually begin to believe it. This is how Mexico is. This is how India is. It is that easy to kill so many people in Chicago and you still get an hour for a coffee break before the cops arrive. This time though, it is different. This time I live here. So, they can’t really fool me! And that’s exactly what I wanted to see.

The first impression of Dubai is an endless desert. Literally a desert all over, and the word DUBAI splashed across the screen. You get this icky feeling in your stomach, but you let it go. You think to yourself; it is actually a desert. So, although this is not how the city looks like, it does look like they’re just 50 km’s away. A big improvement from shooting Body of Lies in Morocco and trying to convince us it is Amman. Then, Tom Cruise playfully swerves around a dozen of camels jaywalking in the middle of the highway!! HELLOOOO!?!? So, your reaction is that you crack a hysterical laugh, and then you suddenly start feeling nauseous! Then you move on. In the next scene Tom Cruise checks into Burj Khalifa. Presumably into Armani Hotel. Although, if I’m correct, Armani doesn’t go all the way up to the 130th floor. But anyway, here it looks all nice and chic. Something tells me this bit was sponsored by the hotel or something like that. Obviously, that’s where the whole fun started and Tom Cruise does his thing with the tower. I have to say, it was an adrenaline-pumping bit. I liked it because it looked like a great stunt.

And then, the real fun begins!!!

Running after Mr. Bad, Mr. Cruise comes out of the tower and immediately, magically, is teleported into DIFC!! The movie has eliminated a full city block! Behind him is, what seems to be, a sandstorm resulting from a big nuclear explosion! You know,  The kind of sandstorms we see in Dubai everyday!! The storm creeps behind the chaser and floods DIFC gate like a Tsunami. I personally have been living in Dubai for seven years, and I’m sad to report that I haven’t seen this kind of storm happen during my time here! Hmmm.. Maybe I don’t go out that much. But of course, if you want to show desert and camels, and you want to spice up the scene a little bit, you add an environmental catastrophe to the mix! Ahh, life! London gets rain, and Dubai bites the dust. Yet again, the characters teleport after emerging from DIFC gate into a place that I have never seen in the whole city!! I was waiting for Emirates towers, but somehow they ended up in some kind of a bazaar, probably in Casablanca (There you go, another movie-influenced impression of Casablanca)! I swear I was trying to think of every place I know in this city to find out where they were but to no avail. Dirt roads and mud houses just after DIFC. In an alternate world this is called Emirates Towers and Wrold Trade Center. No problem, who cares. Next, the Bad Guy steals a BMW, and Tom follows suit and finds his own BMW! A convertible that just lost its roof to the devilish storm from Jupiter. A car pursuit ensues, during which Tom crashes half the cars on what is presumably Sheikh Zayed Road, before taking a shortcut to force a head on collision with the Bad guy. In the process, he crosses all 7 lanes of SZR in the opposite direction without facing a single car!! Gets on the ramp, and gets his head on collision. Airbags open, neither of them is as much as bruised. Safe BMW’s I hear you say.

If the movie was shot somewhere else I wouldn’t have had a single thought about all of this. How would I know how Chicago looked like! Maybe it is all possible. But the fact that I live here, made all of this look funny. Sometimes “good” funny, and sometimes “bad” funny. And that brings me to the other conclusion; next time a European asks me while I’m on a trip to Europe, how many camels live in my neighborhood, or how do I cope with sandstorms, I’ll understand where this gibberish comes from.

Now to the positive part. Dubai got some promotion out of this. Exposure is never that bad, and you can count on more tourists coming to see the place where Tom Cruise ran sky to Earth. But if I am not pushing it too far, maybe the director could’ve squeezed a romantic scene by the fountain. You know, probably from the porch of Sammach in Souk Al Bahar.

On a different subject, Agent Nathan Hunt crashed yet another BMW in the most spectacular way, and yet again the airbags came out, and he lived! BMW is safe, I hear you repeat. BMW also threw in their new concept car for Mr. Hunt to drive, which is impressive considering that he has just lost his funding from the US government. I think it is a matter of principle! If you are going to save the world, better do it in style.

Tom Cruise was the producer of this movie, and this partially explains the amount of advertisement that is shoved up your throat while you are watching. You walk into Armani Hotel wearing and Armani suit. You try to hack a state of the art DELL server. You use your iPhone as the way of top secret communication with your dangerous but good colleagues, but then you run around Dubai carrying a Galaxy tab that is getting more air time than Tom Cruise himself. It’s all good, I got the message.

As the movie indicates, it is another mission impossible. It’s another series of improbable events taking place in a time-space warp scenario, involving Tom Cruise defying all laws of nature and all processes of human brain. But I get it. Extreme circumstances require extreme actions. Heroes do the impossible, and as Adidas once said, Impossible is Nothing!! Having said that, what still baffles me, what makes me sleepless, what is hard for me to comprehend, digest, or wrap my head around, is this…

How was it possible for Tom Cruise to drive THAT FAST around Dubai without getting a single speeding ticket!! This is truly Mission Impossible!

The Best Part: CAT FIGHT

The annual conversation with my city starts today. Conveniently spared the buzz of summer, and the orgasmic state of affairs this lady experiences during the season. A violent orgasm and social schism. We meet once a year. We fight, and I usually give in. It’s a curse to love someone you hate. It’s a mutiny to love an underachiever, and yet I’m guilty of the biggest crime. She ignored me for so long, I had to pack an leave. I loved her for so long, but as a prima donna she endlessly deceives.

So, once again, we met. Let’s see how you play your cards this time around. After all, home deserves yet another chance.

When living in a place that is multicultural and a melting pot of several civilizations languages and race, the topic of culture is oftendiscussed during social gatherings, over drinks, or at a dinner table. It’s a different discussion from the one that takes place when tourists come to your own country and you try to sell them what’s good about it. It is also different from that discussion you have with your friend about a place you want to go to like Paris, Rome or Athens. Usually the later are positive, full of praise and admiration, just like the pitch you give to tourists coming to your country. The one I’m talking about though takes the form of a debate. Pro and cons. Some are for and some are against. This type of “culture discussion” takes place in places like Dubai more often.

I’m well known amongst my friends and colleagues to be an advent of Dubai. I’ve gone to great length to defend Dubai before those who choose to critique it. I have actually alienated some people in the process, and some of my friends hate that about me. They believe that I should dedicate more time and energy defending and championing Jordan as my home country. Well, it so happens that I’m of the view that unless you are a heartless thankless mercenary you should give back to the place that embraced you financially and socially for the past seven years, so I offer no apologies. I like Dubai, and I will keep defending it.

The previous introduction was necessary in the context of what follows. The usual accusation Dubai receives is that it’s fake. It’s plastic and it has no culture. It’s just a concrete jungle full of men in suits or in safety helmets going about their lives to collect money and flee the scene. Guns for hire. According to the champions of this view Dubai is the exact opposite of places like New York – ironically another concrete jungle-, Paris, Rome, London, Beirut, Amman and the list goes on. These places are supposedly immersed in culture that even if you’re sitting on a toilet seat answering nature’s call you are being cultured about it. The problem is that people who actually embrace this idea apparently never read the definition of culture in a dictionary. I can argue that they lack any education in what is culture or what is its impact on people living it. So here is a starting point, the definition of culture

Culture (n): The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also: the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time.

The surprising piece a lot of people are not aware of is that buildings are not elements of a culture! For example, just as Burj Khalifa is not a characteristic of Dubai’s culture, the Eiffel tower, Arc de triumph, statue of liberty, and the acropolis are not elements of the culture of those places. Culture is about people and how they behave. So if you are travelling somewhere hoping to experience the culture of that place, the last thing you should do is to go sightseeing. You’re just looking at buildings, usually built by people who are long gone, and have an ever fading influence on the contemporary culture of that place. If that wasn’t the case, then Greece should be ruling the world right now, but the Acropolis is doing little to help that cause, and is equally doing little to influence the culture of the greek people.

Accusing Dubai of being fake or plastic is not completely baseless, but it’s blatantly hypocritical. New York isn’t the product of some prehistoric civilizations who grew century after century building a layer after layer of civilization. It came to existence through much of the same mechanics that built Dubai. Immigrants from different continents who went there in search of a better life. They went there looking for financial gains and fresh starts. The resulting melting pot formulated the personality of the city and the habits of its residents. That’s why New York is until now considered a different American City. They have their own accent, they have their own habits, and they have what is now called New Yorkan fighting spirit, or survival instinct. Just ask Alicia Keys. Hence, denying Dubai a similar path is an act of hypocrisy by people who are far from being open-minded or adaptive to change. Another reason why it’s hypocritical is that, believe it or not, trees in Dubai are real, people are from flesh and blood, and the buildings aren’t holograms. Most importantly, the interactions between its residents are real, so is the resulting culture.

Muslims and especially Arabs should have a keen interest in Dubai and its story, simply because there is no other place in the middle east that offers the opportunity to interact with so many nationalities in a relaxed environment. Unfortunately for us a lot of the interaction between the middle east and the west either takes place through news channels, and we know how that works, or through Middle Easterners in the west. This last medium is a bit of problem, simply because it so happens that a lot of those living in Europe are essentially illegal immigrants! Not everyone, but a lot. I have a Moroccan colleague and a friend of mine who worked in our offices in France. He went back to Morocco mainly because the french couldn’t make the distinction between him and those illegal immigrants who live in the suburbs of Paris, or those who booed the French national anthem during a football match versus Tunisia in France! Though they are officially french! It’s not entirely the West fault, illegal immigrants are a problem. In contrast, Dubai offers the opportunity for a more balanced and realistic interaction and it works. You will find that a lot of Europeans or North Americans who work in Dubai are more accepting of Arabs and Muslims. They understand more the culture and personality. They are more tolerant and understanding, and though many might not agree with the elements of this culture they learn to accept it and respect it, which is a good progress compared to the image those living in the ranches of Texas have in mind. This last point is in itself a characteristic of Dubai’s Culture. A British guy saying Khalas, inshallah, khalli walli is a brit living in Dubai.

The other surprising thing is the role of “perceived culture” in people’s life. Just ask a french guy how many times he was at the top of the Eiffel tower or inside the museum, or how many times a New Yorkan has been to the statue of Liberty. I, for one, have been to Petra twice in my 30 years on this planet. One of them took place while I was on vacation back from Dubai. So, the question is, what is the impact that one is willing to have on his/her life in exchange of living next to a monument that he or she will visit a couple of times in their life? The answer varies, but in general people tend to choose what offers them a better standard of life. Some have the ability to choose, but some are stuck with what the components of their personalities limited them to. Rendering choices to financial reasons and then demonic these choices is flawed as everyone moves to the place that offers them more. There is always some kind of a trade off or sacrifice, otherwise we would all live in Utopia because that is the logical thing to do. Unsurprising, such place doesn’t exist.

If you want to run a test and see how many people choose a place to live, don’t ask them a straightforward question, because in most cases people will justify their decision citing some abstracts or emotional reasons! Culture, history, spirit, weather, sunshine, etc. The real question should be; who accepted a hefty pay cut to be able to move to a place? Even if a woman did so, it’s most likely because her husband got a better paying job there and she is moving with him, or the other way around.

So what you are finally left with is how to look at that decision? Do you embrace it and immerse yourself in the place? Or, you sit on the sidelines, curse your luck, and look for flaws?! It is up to you.

Dubai has culture. A buzzing one in that. There are generations being born here, interacting with people from backgrounds they wouldn’t normally intact with at an early stage of life. They are moulded by the diversity of this city, and are more willing to think outside the box or look beyond stereotypes. This generation travels more than others, speaks more languages than others, knows more religions than others. They are familiar with beaches and malls. Sedans and 4X4′s. They saw a lot of sunshine. They have a friend called Raj, one called Mohammed usually referred to as Moe, one called Jane and one called Chang. They drink Lemon with Mint. They say Khalas, Sida, Jaldi, Maganda and acha. They know Europe, Asia, America and Africa more than anybody else, and they know how to be politically correct. They celebrate Eid, Christmas, Diwali, Halloween and Valentine. They drive like maniacs and assume someone is going to fill their petrol tanks in gas stations. Even if they leave for good, all of this will remain imprinted in their memory.

If you don’t believe in this culture, then you should leave. Unless you are willing to admit that you are a mercenary and a gun for hire. In that case, the joke is on you. You are the one who needs some cultural education.

It’s been a long time since I posted something here. Maybe I didn’t have much to say, or maybe I was just too busy to write about anything. I can for example try to blame my iPhone, since I have apparently stopped blogging immediately after I bought it. I thought I would b more connected, but what actually happened I got too distracted with the extra access that the Blackberry didn’t offer. Whatever the reason the consequence were not so good. I had a feeling that Palordinia just started picking up when I dropped the ball again. Maybe it’s time I realized that I should call things what they really are.

There is so much going on in the world at the moment. Dictators are falling, others consolidating their powers, and some are still

The Veto Democracy

hanging their hopes on a puppet to give them their state. Yes, I’m talking to many of you, and I’m talking about Obama. I’ll dance naked in the street and rub my butt cheeks against the asphalt if this guys doesn’t use his damned veto on the Palestinian issue. If you are not physically there to see it, give me your email and I’ll send you a video copy. What is this UN anyway?! Just dissolve he damn thing. How can anyone still believe in the usefulness of a body created by the winners of a global war, right after they destroyed everybody else?! Are you telling me that a country representing 300 Million (almost 5% of the world’s population) can decide what is NOT good for my nation? Can you imagine a corporation run by 5 out of 100 shareholders? If you assume that all 100 shareholders have the same share, then that is a pretty fucked up equation! Unless, of course, you believe that The US government is in possession of some divine wisdom that the rest of the world was is not lucky to have!

I have an idea…

Why don’t Brazil, India, Turkey and Mexico just walk out!! How about if the 22 Arab countries pull out! Why not Indonesia and Pakistan? Amongst them you have 2.4 billion people! that is over 34% of the world’s population. It will have no legitimacy! This screwed up organization should be taken down. It’s really absurd, and I just can’t see how countries like Brazil and India are putting up with it. Mighty France for example accounts for 1% of the world’s population and still they can block any decision concerning any country if they didn’t like it.

Democracy? Are you serious!