The world's most pointless city

Is Dubai. This city, not Manhattan or London is the cruel face of unfettered modern greed. But first, a bit of history. Several hundreds of millions of years ago, gigatonnes of zooplankton and algae were buried under a settling sea and underwent endothermic reactions to create what we know as petroleum in that region of the world we call the Middle East. In the last couple of millenia, a band of feckless nomads wandered into that desert and claimed it for their own. Said nomads then spent the next few centuries plundering each other's tents. Early in the twentieth century, that most intrepid and rapacious of all the European colonialists, the British found a use for them. They decided to turn these camel riders into a weapon against what was probably the longest lived Muslim nation ever: the Ottomans. The war ended, and the British left.. well sort of. They came back when they found oil. And that began the greatest historical example of an entire people becoming parasites. It is merely the value of oil, and the epic coincidence of those nomads wandering on this particular piece of soil that makes the Mid East the battleground and the promised land that is is. But for the machinery of extracting oil (not even refining it), there is scarcely an ounce of industry there. By industry, I mean both the noun and the verb...

What passes for society there is a collection of xenophobic and misogynistic laws that some apologists call 'culture'. And wealth. Wealth beyond measure, wealth beyond imagination, but only for a select few. And the former nomads love to show off their wealth. They have constructed the world's most luxurious hotels, indoor skiing ranges in the middle of the desert and countless other temples to greed. Sadly, Universities, research centres, schools of engineering and other such trivialities have been somewhat ignored. Who needs PhDs and patent offices when you can have indoor skiing ranges, right? Just as long as suburban soccer moms keep insisting on driving their Escalades and Explorers to malls, petrodollars will keep flowing, and with it, this bubble of prosperity that Dubai stands on will keep expanding.

The dirty underbelly of this colossal construction business is what happens to the migrant workers who actually build skyscrapers. These people are poor workers from India, China and many other parts of South/South East Asia. They are the subhuman detritus left by the expanding bubble Arab hubris. What keeps them there? Certainly, China and India are not 'forgiving' economies. Making a living in modern India is not easy if you are not a software engineer. But for all our considerable demerits, we have just voted a passably decent government into power and we have the most egalitarian Constitution ever written. In a brief conversation with a Kuwaiti kid who goes to school in the town I live in, certain matters of perception become apparent. He thought I had studied at some posh 'English school', as he put it. When I told him that I went to a government school which charged my folks a pittance (and does not charge girl students anything at all), he was taken aback. My point is that India and Indians, for all that we have going against us, try! Emiratis are perfectly happy to sit on their bloated arses and have essentially slave labour working their streets and Caucasian engineers keeping their power plants running. That is not a sustainable economy, neither is it a sustainable country. And when the bubble collapses, as it inevitably will, this arrogance will be remembered.

Article: Sordid reality behind Dubai's gilded facade