Dubai Diary 12 - Random Scenes

What is Dubai without its malls? Coming from a country where 300 million people are estimated to be below the poverty line, which itself is set at Rs. 32 a day,these malls appeared to me to belong not to earth but some other planet. Completely surreal. I couldn't bring myself to enter any one of those fancy showrooms and boutiques and satisfied myself with wandering down the corridors wondering at the glitter and the people. Of course I could appreciate the elegant products on display, but not for a minute did I want any for myself. I only felt a deep abysmal despair on seeing the unbridgeable chasm between the worlds of the haves and that of the have-nots.

 The Mall of the Emirates

Dubai Festival City

Jumeirah and the underwater world of The Lost Atlantis

 Palm Jumeirah is a man-made island just off the coast at Dubai.

The island is in the shape of a palm tree with residential apartments and villas built on the frond shaped land on two sides of the trunk road that ends in a dream-like super luxurious resort. Part of the attraction of the resort is an underwater world which is an attempted reconstruction of the lost Atlantis. As we sped through the trunk road, gasping at the villas and multi-rise super deluxe apartments on both sides, my husband explained that everyone who was someone in Bollywood and India's cricketing elite owned a house at Jumeirah. The taxi driver chipped in, "All the corrupt people in India and Pakistan have houses here. No one else can afford them." I marvelled that richness had become so closely connected with corruption, that the two words are used almost as synonyms in contexts such as this.

We saw the underwater world and traveled back to mainland Dubai on the monorail that connects this fantasy world with mainland Dubai.

Watch our most ancient ancestors, the jellyfish, without a care in the world, pumping away, existing away...

 Dubai is utopia and I wonder if utopias actually exist or are mere transient iridescent bubbles?