T-Shirt

The art of conversation is a difficult one to get right. Being interesting is something we all frequently fail at and this is nowhere more true than at social occasions such as parties. I have found myself increasingly engaged in conversations that I simply don’t want to have any more, simply because the topic has been boiled to death so many times previously that it seems pointless to once more go through the weary motions. And so I have invented the Talking T-Shirt. All you have to do is download the PDF file attached at the end of this link and print it out onto T-Shirt transfer film. Then iron the transfer onto a plain white T-Shirt and you will never, ever have to talk to someone at a party about Dubai traffic again. Just point at the T-Shirt and conserve your energies for the pursuit of that Brunette from Barsha.

No, no, please. No thanks necessary. I consider it a public service...

And now, thanks to NZM, the blindingly obvious (to NZM, not to me!) solution of a JPG file, so you can click on the pic below and print out from that if you don't want to go linking externally to PDF files!

TV

Today’s Gulf News is an unexpectedly racy read. Not only are Dubai Police warning transvestites, with top cop and sometime poet Dahi Khalfan Tamim pondering the fact that mixed education is to blame for the rise in transvestism in the UAE, but there’s been an outbreak of lesbianism, too! Two women have apparently been jailed for a month each for ‘cuddling and kissing and behaving like a married couple’ on a public beach, according to the multi-kilo wodge of daily paper. One can only assume that they had a row because one of them had forgotten the sun-tan lotion.

But it’s the transvestites story that has that lovely touch of pottiness to it. There’s something quite delicious about a five-day crackdown on cross-dressers: “transvestites have been seen of late in public places, including shopping malls” we are told. I can't wait for it: ladies with suspiciously large hands and adams apples had better watch out, no?

It’s all rather reminiscent of early 1960s Britain, to be honest – the ebb and flow of a society struggling to preserve its values in the face of the pressures of the modern age. Touches like blaming a rise in transvestism on mixed education really give it that whiff of Ealing comedy, though.

A sort of Middle Eastern version of Passport to Pimlico is what’s needed, methinks...

A footnote: I wonder if Scottish people in Dubai dare wear their kilts over the coming week? Now that arrest would make a marvellous news story...

Club

It is now some weeks since I started posting a weekly extract from the book that appears as if it may change my life, 1111 Letters for All Occasions. I am becoming very grateful indeed that I have found it.

As an insight into the lives, loves, morality, interactions and struggles of 1970s India, 1111 Letters is a rare document of no small historical importance. Thanks to New Light Publishers of New Delhi, we are able to delve into the lives of everyday Indians in a very special and insightful way. Many readers of this blog have been delighted by the colourful and charming vignettes unveiled by this most special of books, to the point where I have been asked to present a lecture at the University of Michigan on the contemporary culture of 1970s India as seen through 1111 Letters for a not inconsiderable emolument. This is expected to be the start of an extensive lecture tour and I have, as a consequence, retained an American Agent to look after my interests.

Needless to say, I retained his services through a letter I wrote him that closely followed the template given in 1111 Letters.

However, I promised I would share an extract each week with you and, regardless of my other obligations, I shall be true to my word. Today, we investigate the section titled ‘Club Correspondence’ – a scathing attack on inequality in every way and a quite riveting correspondence. I apologise for the extract being a little long and complicated, but club membership was obviously not easy in days of yore.

I confess that the last letter in this series made me cry.

Club Correspondence

To join a social club you need some social correspondence with the Secretary of the Club before you are admitted and become a member. Some such letters are given below.

Qualifications

The Secretary
Chelmsford Club
New Delhi

Sir
Can I join your club? What are the qualifications necessary for becoming a member of the Chelmsford Club?

Yours faithfully

Reply to Above

Dear Sir
A brochure is enclosed herewith giving all the necessary information for the new members.
Yours faithfully

Introduction

Dear Sir
I am quite new to New Delhi and I think I know no member of the Chelmsford Club. Then, how can I be introduced?

Yours faithfully

Reply to above

Dear Sir
Please attend our Club dinner tomorrow night and bring the papers along duly completed.

I will have you introduced.

Yours faithfully

Reply to Reply

Dear Sir
I regret that I shall not be able to meet members of the Chelmsford Club tomorrow as I am flying to Bombay tonight.

Please make it later.

Yours faithfully

Open Offer

Dear Sir
Come to our club any evening at your convenience with the completed form.
Please ring me for an appointment.

Yours faithfully

Sending a form

Dear Sir
Kindly find enclosed herewith the Application Form of the Chelmsford Club duly completed and introduced.

Please enrol me as a member.

Yours faithfully

Negative Reply

Dear Sir
I am placing the form before the Governing Body of the Club in their next meeting.

I will inform you of the result some time next week.

Yours faithfully

Membership

Please intimate me the decision of the Governing Body about my enrolment as a member.

Thanks

Positive Reply

I am glad to inform you that you have been duly enrolled as a full member of the Chelmsford Club.

Negative Reply

I regret to inform you that the Governing Body has not been able to accord you membership of the Club. Your cheque for payment is returned herewith.

Reply to Reply

I fear the Chelmsford Club continues to be a Whitemen’s club with Whitemen’s mentality as in the days of the Whitemen’s burden.

The black must bear the burden of the White.

Next week: Letters to the Editor

Blacktop

Nipped up to Hatta yesterday for a quick tour with visiting guests. Having seen a bunch of workers starting on it last time we were up there a few months ago, I had expected to find tarmac on the track and my expectations were fulfilled. After the first crossing of Wadi Hatta itself, the road is 100% blacktop all the way through the mountains and down onto the plan. Blacktop stretches out to the left at the T-junction, the way to Al Ain. And blacktop stretches to the right as well – and has done for quite some while now. I’m fond of jinking off this road to the left, through Wadi Sumayni and through an Omani border post: the landscape here has some unusual rock formations not unlike those found in Wadi Bih and the foothills give way to the Madam plain and then into the desert. The transition of landscapes is quite amazing and you can then nip up onto the dam across the wadi and then up to the Madam/Al Ain road. Except that now the Omani border fence stretches all the way up to the Hatta Road and they’ve welded the damn dam gate shut. So we had to roar up the graded track to the Hatta road.

Our visitors, from Australia, delightedly christened the long green border fence, ‘the rabbit proof fence’, which did rather amuse me. What amazed them was that miles and miles of concrete and steel fence topped with twists of razor wire then simply opened up at the main road with no crossing or check point. They saw the whole thing as utterly pointless and I must admit it’s always mystified me.

The long and short of it is that, sadly, yet another of the great tracks through the mountains is now a metalled road.

RIP, then, the Great Hatta Track.

Mafsoum

Mafsoum is a great Arabic word. It’s something of a meme in the company wot I work for, made popular by the Jordanians and a word all of us use frequently, and amusingly, in conversation. It’s very useful, one of a few compelling additions to Ten Word Arabic and, when used judiciously, it will scatter your enemies like shouting ‘I’ve got a cobalt bomb in this briefcase!’ would scatter a WEF Plenary. Because mafsoum means ‘schizophrenic’.

Isn’t that cool? Just slip it into conversation: “Enta mafsoum!” (you’re a schizo!) if you’re feeling like risking a black eye, or a sly “Howi mafsoum!” (he’s a schizo).

Why am I babbling about schizophrenia? (‘ere listen to ‘im: ‘es ‘avin’ a go at ver bleedin’ schizowotnots now!)

The fact that Etisalat is promoting a service, on its Weyak mobile services platform, that lets mobile users take pictures and upload them to their Facebook page surely is evidence of a most fundamental schizophrenia. On the one hand they’re blocking social sites like Orkut, Flikr and Twitter and even lumps of Facebook itself, on the other they’re trying to drive the adoption of these services!

Rather cack-handedly, if I’m professionally honest: a blunderbuss of SMS spam is probably not the best communications tool to use in driving adoption of a Facebook related service. Perhaps they'd have been better using... errr.. Facebook?

Is this evidence of an internal battle between conservatism and free thinking radicals? Is it a cross-company integrated strategy to build adoption to the point where the block is untenable? Perhaps it’s just good old fashioned addle-pated organisational idiocy?

Or just simply that they’re mafaseem!...

Reason

21 Ways To Tell You’ve Been Living In The Middle East Too Long

• You go home to the UK and stand waiting for someone to pack your bag in Sainsbury’s until Someone In Management has to ask you what the problem is.

• Speed bumps are not a signal to slow down, they’re a signal to overtake the traffic that’s slowed down and get 20 cars ahead by nipping in just ahead of the lorry coming the other way.

• The doctor prescribes a broad spectrum antibiotic and you tell him that’s no use because you’re already taking Augmentin for your snuffly nose.

• You automatically insert ‘inshallah’ into any future prediction or agreement to act in any way.

• They come out to you on holiday but you go home to them on a tour of duty.

• There’s a screw loose in a door handle in your house and not only isn’t it the end of the world and a major domestic crisis but it doesn’t actually get fixed for months.

• The sight of girls wearing short skirts makes you want to go up to them and have a go about dressing properly.

• Self service petrol stations are a treat.

• When you hear “Panchos” it makes you think of a dwarf in a sombrero.

• You run out of toilet paper but use tissues instead because you can’t be bothered to make the trip for some bog paper.

• You and your partner don’t hold hands in public when you’re in the Middle East, but you do at home.

• You ask the waiter at The Berkeley in London for ‘Masafi’.

• He brings it and you don’t notice.

• The bloke that answers the ‘phone at your Lebanese takeaway knows your voice, name, address and your order off by heart and calls you ‘habibi’.

• You keep putting things in the wrong bins when you go back home to stay with friends/relatives in the UK.

• You don’t know what an Oyster card is, you haven’t got an Oyster card, you can’t see why you should be expected to have one and what’s more you have a row with the bus driver because he can’t work out why an English person would be trying to put a pound coin in the slot the ticket comes out of.

• It makes your blood boil when people talk about how visionary Dubai Internet City is because it attracted the global IT industry to Dubai. Because you can remember when the entire IT industry was already here and had to drag their sorry asses up the road to some zone because it was announced by the government and they felt they had no choice but to comply and move in.

• Undertaking is perfectly acceptable and any short cut is a ‘witty’ thing to do, not a ‘wrong’ thing to do.

• You read the words “Freehold! Live Your Dreams!” and they translate as “No Federal Legal Right of Tenure, Leasehold With a Lunatic Developer as Your Landlord in Law!”

• You can remember when x was ‘just sand’, where x is any given area of Dubai outside Bastakia and Deira souk; any old bit of Sharjah; Riyadh beyond Airport Road, Pepsi Cola and Sitteeen Street; Doha; anything outside Muscat; beyond the Bab Al Bahrain; anything outside the Kuwait City Inner Ring; Amman’s Third Circle and Cairo outside the city centre. Similarly when the Abu Dhabi highway was one lane with no camel fencing and the world’s most dangerous night drive, the Trade Center the tallest building, Garhoud didn’t have a bridge and on and on and on and on...

• When you see another British person, even in an otherwise empty room, your first instinct is not to stand behind them and form a queue.

• It doesn’t all seem quite as much fun any more...

Diplomat

It is often difficult to understand the thought processes behind the authors of the world’s greatest collection of letters since Samuel Johnson started a career in correspondence with a thank you note to his Gran for her Christmas gift of a jigsaw puzzle picturing a bear fight, 1111 Letters for Every Occasion. As I have said many times before, this most impressive volume comes to us by grace of the commercial acumen of New Light Publishers of Delhi.

As promised last week, today’s extract covers that most difficult of fields, diplomatic correspondence and we are all lucky that 1111 Letters’ author, the remarkable K. Malik, pursued a career in letters rather than diplomacy, otherwise his efforts to ensure the Pakistan issue was well managed would have doubtless have resulted in New Delhi being a radioactive hole by now.

Rather than omit advice that might be of help to those entrusted with preserving world peace and the brotherhood of man, I have reproduced the entire section.

A historical note here: it should be possible to date the original MSS of 1111 Letters from the reference below to the UAR, which was a union of Egypt and Syria under Nasser that lasted until 1961 – the name was subsequently kept by Nasser and was used until 1971, just after his death. The Shimla, or Simla, summit took place in 1972. The first Gulf War, between Iraq and Iran, broke out in 1980 – the Yom Kippur War of 1973 might be an explanation for the reference to ‘the Gulf war’. Alternatively, I might just be wasting my time because K. Malik is clearly in a different place to most of us and it is possible that this book comes to us from a parallel universe, in which case all these dates and references are subject to change.

Diplomatic Correspondence

Diplomatic correspondence between one country and another, one ambassador and another, is a rather tricky affair. All embarrassing commitments are made in vague words.

Egypt

Should we now presume that the UAR is going anti-Russian?

Reply to Above

It is best to presume nothing.

Pakistan

Will the President of Pakistan go against the spirit of Shimla Summit?

Reply to Above

Ask the President himself!

Israel

Has Israel attacked Egypt after the Gulf war?

Reply to Above

Israel has never attacked Egypt. It is Egypt which has always attacked Israel.

UAR

Is the UAR now anti-Russian?

Reply to Above

The UAR is not anti-anything.

USA

How long will USA bar Yugoslavia from the United Nations?

Reply to Above

I do not know.

Next week: Seeking Compensation...

Wrong

I’d never heard of a ‘CLM’ until a colleague disagreed with me during the meeting in front of a client and their partners in some initiative thingy or another. I had said something wise and befitting my advancing years and grey hair and my young colleague had brutally pointed out that I was talking complete rot.

The senior chap from the partner company was obviously impressed by this and said something along the lines of ‘Wooohooo, young lady! You just made a CLM!’

‘CLM?’

‘Why, yes! A Career Limiting Move! You know, disagreeing with the boss like that!’

Both myself and young colleague were open-mouthed.

Firstly I avoid at all times any use of words like ‘boss’. I hate the word and the concept behind it. One of the great scourges of the Arab World is the whole attitude summed up in the phrase ‘Ana mudhir’ or ‘I am the boss’. If the boss says black is white, then black is white. And everyone goes down that unproductive path together, falling over each other in the rush to tell the boss what a visionary he is.

It’s one of the most revolting sights in business and if you thought the Arab World was alone, try working with a few American corporates...

Secondly, since when does disagreeing with a colleague because you’re young and know better count as a career limitation? I was lucky enough as a young man to work for someone that let me get away with youthful murder and the least I can do is tread the same path. For no better reason than that I was frequently right and my mentor was therefore frequently right to back me. I was also frequently wrong, but he had the grace to let me do that, too, without making too much fuss about it. I like to think that the balance was in the company’s favour.

So I do feel very strongly that people should have the space to have alternative viewpoints and opinions: that great work is put together by people who are happy to work together with give and take, be open to consultation and have enough mutual respect to take each others’ views into account. I’d die within hours of having to work in a company where colleagues were scared to disagree because the boss brooks no disagreement.

That doesn’t mean the young and opinionated shouldn’t be beaten up and put in their place when they’re being muckleheaded, by any means. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t ultimately reserve the right to a veto. But when someone knows they’re right and has the courage and passion to state it, then you have every reason in the world to listen to them just in case, God forbid, they know more than you do…

In short, CLM my butt.

Here endeth the lecture. Normal service resumed Sunday...

Nakba

Gulf News carried a series of spreads today marking 'Al Nakba', which is Arabic for 'the catastrophe', the Palestinian day of mourning for the loss of the land in which they lived. Al Nakba is generally marked on the 15th May, so it's slightly unusual for Gulf News to have gone so heavy on the 14th. They were alone: everyone else has been waiting for the day itself.

Nakba is marked on the 15th because it was the day that the British Mandate in Palestine expired. The declaration of the State of Israel was made on the 14th.

The tales of dispossession and loss contained in the paper are heart-rending - and I have been reading and hearing similar tales for something like 20 years now. They never lose their ability to make me profoundly sad. I am sure we will see a great deal more tomorrow as other newspapers publish pieces marking the day.

Al Nakba is particularly poignant this year, because this is the 60th year since the Palestinians were forced off their land. They left carrying their house keys because they thought they'd be back soon once the fuss died down: Robert Fisk's brilliant Pity the Nation starts with his attempts to understand and come to terms with the people in the Lebanese camps who still kept their keys. And people still keep them today, a symbol of the right to return to their land.

It's a strangely beautiful land, too. All around the Dead Sea, the stony soil is home to olive trees and the land is green in winter, dry and arid in the summer. Farming it manually must have been back-breaking work. But it gave birth to a people and culture that is vibrant and deep: today some 70% of Jordanians are originally Palestinian and their art, poetry and design are a huge part of Jordan's richness as a nation.

I think there will be a lot of grief around the Middle East tomorrow. I only hope that people can share their sorrow and are allowed at least to grieve in peace just for one day.

Ramble

The inevitable consequence of living in a place where every nationality of the world comes together is that the language used by the vast majority to try and at least communicate at a basic level, English, gets a good old mangling. The results are often delightful and frequently hysterical. I mean, I live in a place where bunnychow, falooda, string hoppers, longanisa, vadas, shawarmas and kucheree are all common types of food!

One particularly rich vein of amusement is ‘Hinglish’, which a term designed to be at least a partial excuse for the appalling mis-use of grammatical English. So if you can’t speak ‘standard’ English, just claim the resultant attempts as a dialect. Why, to be sure to be sure, don’t we have ‘Iringlish’ or, och aye the noo, ‘Sconglish’? Mind you, God knows, the English themselves can’t use the damn language properly, either. I have long wanted to speak at considerable length to the British Greengrocers’ Annual Conference on the topic of apostrophes.

I am doing the needful. I am wanting to raise the matter with the concerned authorities. I am putting my car in your backside. If it is not working, then what to do? Please be telling the gentleman the train is leaving yesterday. I am not understanding. One piece three Dirhams only. He is out of station only. Mr Mukherjee has expired. You ‘go down’ from the car when you leave it, but a ‘godown’ is also a shed or storage space. This is the sort of stuff that underpins the lovely, apocryphal, tale of the annoyed Emirates passenger complaining to the purser after his repeated use of the crew call button had been ignored: “I am fingering one of your girls for thirty minutes and she is not coming!”

These little linguistic differences can sit at the centre of some marvellous misunderstandings and incomprehensions, but clarity can often be tantalisingly close. Many moons ago, having just arrived here and started work with my entertainingly maverick colleague Matt The Ad Manager, we were in the habit of ordering lunchtime burgers from the burger joint (called Hot Burger or Tasty Burger or something) below our office which was, at the time, in deeply fashionable Ajman. The burgers were always pink in the middle, which Matt could not abide and his efforts to correct the problem got more and more frustrated with each passing day:

Burgers well done please!

Can you cook the burger a lot?

Fry the burger for a long time!

Cook the burger more, yes?

WELL DONE! YOU UNDERSTAND WELL DONE?

Finally we drafted in Mohan the office boy and, after a great deal of explaining, he did that lovely dawning comprehension look that Manuel does in Fawlty Towers when the penny drops.

Mohan called in the order: “Doay burger. Cookie cookie!”

Perfection was subsequently delivered.