Tid Bit from My Diary

There is something quite unique about a bridge not far away from Dubai. It is a narrow bridge which only allows only oneway traffic. You have to wait for your turn to get into the bridge and can only do that once the car already on the bridge have crossed over and no one from the other side has started. This is the only link to the mainland and if something happens to that bridge you will be in limbo! There are no traffic light or traffic cop but people ensure that there is a smooth movement of traffic back and forth. Why can't we have this behavior within the city limits? Well that is a million dollar question. Within the city limits we are different people.. "bina juddhe nahi debo succhagro medini" (will not concede any land even equivalent to the tip of a needle without a fight). Once you cross over to the other side there is nothing ....... not a black hole though! But a vast deserted sand punctuated by the track marks of 4X4 vehicles and then converges into the prist...

Talk about the birth of radio and many a great name pops up in front of our eyes; Faraday, Maxwell, Jagadish Chandra Bose and off course Guglielmo Marconi. I am not going to discuss much about this here. I would like to remember the radio we have seen in India before Television became popular and affordable and its gradual waning and miraculous comeback. Our favorite AIR, the all India Radio, commenced operation in 1936, as a government organization. The objectives was to inform, educate and entertain the masses. But it did much more than that. It had struck a cord with the masses. RabindranathTagore named it akashvani which m eans voice from the sky and it was a word which was coined particularly for this purpose. Radio in those days was at the center of people's life. People in the village used to get together every evening to listen to their favorite songs and for the latest news. As we know numerous plays and movies had been written with radio at core of the story. Those were ...

It helps at times to look out of the window without trying to focus on any particular object but stare at a distance. It clears my thought process and opens up the mind to the world of imagination and ideas. One particular morning with a freshly prepared coffee in my mug, I walked up and stood in front of the window. It was in the 10th floor in one of the mid-rise buildings of downtown Dubai. We had a wonderful view of the creek, golf club and the city skyline with intermittent take off and landing of aeroplanes from this office. That morning it was a building construction site across the street that caught my attention. It was buzzing with activities. At this point one would be tempted to wonder what is new in this, probably 80 out of 100 windows in Dubai has got a similar view, a construction site with whole lot of activities. After all this is a city which has employed almost 60% of worlds total number of tower cranes. It has built in ten years what took better part of a millennium ...

First week in March of 2008 when I relocated myself to realize the Dubai dream I was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of things in this city. Living in Dubai is completely a different experience than visiting the city for a day or transiting by its airport. I was speechless as I discovered a city so vibrant and so full of life with so much of glitz all around. I was put up in a service apartment on the Sheikh Zayed road and used the public transport to commute to and from my office in Deira. It was almost like a skiing, could not have been smoother. I used to wonder while it only takes 15 minutes travel to and back from my workplace, why is all this fuss that people make about Dubai Jam. Soon I realized that it was only the beginner's luck that worked in my favor when I had to wait only for a few minutes to get my morning taxi while a phone call to the RTA call center used send me a taxi to get me home safe and sound. The rude awakening came as I found out it is was not only diffi...

Today the internet has become a part of our life, so much so that we now have a mental condition where in the patients suffers from a disorder that arises out of not being able to access the internet. People find it difficult to handle the situation where they cannot access the Google to search for something that came accross their mind. This might be an extreme condition, but it is quite normal to use internet for their day to day life in staying connected and staying enlightened. None of these can be termed as selfless acts even if these are not selfish but we seldom put back to the web as much as we seem to have taken from it. The article that I came across in a weekend magazine is about spreading the good word and is a complete eye opener. It all started when young Melissa Morris-Ivone encountered a polite gesture from a fellow human being; a gesture which used to be part of a normal day's work in the good old times. Today we are in a world of cut throat competition. With all t...

Grab a couple of dollars and fly into Zimbabwe. Voila! you become a millionaire. This perhaps is easiest way to become a millionaire today. But sometimes it better not to take the easy route. The challenge is to retire as one and that too in dollars term. Till yesterday Zimbabwe and its millions has been a party joke. Now with recession staring at our faces it is not easy any more to laugh at others. The relatively younger generation with lot of determination and a bit of prudence can still work out a plan to end up in a comfortable situation at their retirement. Though the big question is how? Lets try to think together how that can be achieved. The bigger question is what does people who are nearing retirement do. I still havn't found an answer. Now lets find out what a person presently going through mid-life crisis do to secure a comfortable retired life. All will agree taht every one dreams to be a millionaire before they hang the boots. But it is not easy and it requires a lot...

Just a few weeks back I was reading a rather interesting article in a local magazine. It spoke about a subject that till recently was not such an acceptable social trend in our society, but things surely seems to have changed with the turn of the century. Well, the article was about "stay -at-home dads". Let me try and give a bit of insight into the concept. Its about men who are not at work everyday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and they seem to be growing in number as well as popularity (conceded Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979-1990). According to British Government statistics, 20,000 men in the UK embrace househusbandhood. Amazing! Well one can check out either www.rebeldad.com or www.slowlane.com for further details. Once I was through with that piece my reaction was perhaps a bit different than others. Oh wow! Is this official now? This is what I uttered to myself. I had started my architectural career with a high profile interior design...