Genetix

See the little nuclei
Bursting full of information
There's a need to regulate
Bring it down to cells and plasma

Tell you what they're gonna do
Started doing it already
Got to find something new
Looking for it in genetix

Found a new game to play
Think it's impossible to lose
Messing round at playing God
Easy way to play genetix

The Stranglers
Genetix, from The Raven, 1979

Have you ever wondered if you have a predisposition to cancer? Ever been curious about what weaknesses you’ve inherited from your parents? Have you ever pondered the idea that silent kinks in your DNA could turn around and kill or debilitate you? Ever stop to think why you hate broccoli or perhaps even why codeine based painkillers don’t seem to work for you?

The answers to these questions are now available from a number of companies, mostly American, which will take a painlessly obtained sample of genetic material from you, usually a swab from inside your cheek, and then analyse this material to give you a report on predispositions to a number of diseases and other known genetically triggered facts of life. It’s known as direct to consumer genetic testing and the most prominent of these appears to be a company called Genetic Health. (BTW - If you're interested in this whole area, I can recommend this article as a primer and this one as a laugh.)

I was surprised to find a huge number of companies, including many outside the States, offering DNA paternity testing. One company I came across even offers you the service of storing a loved one's DNA, which did strike me as a little... American? But the industry remains largely US dominated and, if you’re interested in getting a look at your genetics, you’re looking at sending a sample to the land of the brave and the home of the free.

Until now.

I was fascinated to find a company had started up offering services based on your genetic profile in the UAE. But then I had reckoned without the Dubai factor. You see DNA-DX will take your DNA sample and then send you back a picture of your gene map for you to use decorating your uber-funky Dubai Projects Pad. Really - the picture at the head of this article is from their really rather stylish website. The site is a compelling visit: for $420, you can have your very own (signed by the founders, mind) and utterly unique piece of 36 by 24 inch art. Your own genetic map.

Forget being worried about cancer or whether your baby is likely to have Downes syndrome. Forget the trillions of dollars and billions of man-hours that have gone into genetic research. Forget the very real ethical issues and debates raging across the world, the conflict between religion and science, the scares and concerns over GMOs and genetic mutations. Forget the petaflops of processor power – the world’s most powerful supercomputers unravelling protein chains and mapping genomes so that we can start to understand, haltingly, the incredibly complex processes that underpin life itself.

Nah. Stuff that. Because we live in Dubai and we’ve got a unique piece of art that celebrates us in a new and wonderful way. And let's face it: we're Dubai people, so we're really, really worth celebrating.

I’ll regale you with a quick quote from the DNA-DX website:

Dubai has recently become a new capital for Design, Fashion and the Arts in the Middle East that is attracting worldwide attention akin to the style centrals such as Milan and Paris. We feel that our GenePortraits are fitting for a demanding populace and a growing culture that oozes style, class and exclusivity in every form.

It did occur to me today that the city we live in is not imposed upon us: it’s a reflection of us. And I’m not sure I altogether like what I see in the glass sometimes.

Iranians

I was bibbling on about speedbump communities developing in the UAE the other day. Another developer-free development that I have been delighted to witness in my time here has been that of the Iranian souks of the Arabian Gulf coastal ports. While Dubai had the long established Iranian community in Bastakia (named after Bastak in Iran and rebuilt in concrete rather than the more authentic Souk Al Arsah in Sharjah which was restored using traditional coral building materials), younger communities have built up in Sharjah, Ajman and Ras Al Khaimah, built around dhows from Iran docking and offloading their cargo of stuff to flog on the side: melamine plates, garish plastic kitchenware, aluminium pots and ‘mutton grab’ trays as well as knock-off brand soaps, cleaners (Dettox! Clorex! Persul!) and detergents.

Ajman’s packing-case Irani souk burned down a few years ago and was replaced with a covered souk by the government. It’s a wonderland of mad plastic and ceramic, local housewives hammering away verbally at moustachioed, swarthy vendors in vests - locked in the glorious traditional ritual of barter.

And in Ras Al Khaimah, you’ll find the Irani souk on the dockside, still made out of wooden offcuts: a long line of stalls selling the whole mad collection of things they make in Iran and China.

Today, the most developed of these port-side souks is the Iranian souk off Sharjah port, which has now become a row of established shops along the corniche road and even has its own distinctive blue mosaic-adorned Irani mosque. It’s here, just off the restored buildings of the old souk and arts area, that you’ll still find ‘poor’ stores selling charcoal, hashish, shishas and traditional brooms and matting, as well as stores selling dried herbs, medicines and traditional bukhours and perfumes: it’s a wonderful evening’s wander along the shopfronts.

Here, incidentally, as well as on Ajman's perimeter road where there are also still a couple of traditional 'poor' stores, you can buy hashish. But don't get too excited - hashish is Arabic for 'grass' and this stuff really is dried grass. And, as I'm wandering, you might (or might not) be interested to know that this is how we derive the English word assassin - it's from the Arabic 'hashishim', or dope-fiends. There's a story to that, but I think I've wandered enough for now...

The shops all have Iranian names and sell floor to ceiling kitchen goods, kitchen electricals, plastic stuff, cool-boxes, spices and pretty much anything else that can be retailed. The opposite side of the road is all bustle, too: the frenetic commerce of the dhow port is at play here – the boats that still ply the ports of the Gulf, Red Sea and East Africa as well as the routes across to India and carry anything from onions or coal to cars and white goods.

If this kind of thing tickles you, incidentally, you’ll love this: Len Chapman’s labour of love (I’ve plugged it before), www.dubaiasitusedtobe.com is a really amazing collection of pictures and anecdotes from the people that truly do remember ‘when that was all sand’... It’s a great place to spend an hour wandering around – particularly if you want to get a feel for quite how astonishing the transition from Dubai to Lalaland has been.

The dhow ports are probably the last surviving link between Len's UAE and ours. I bet they'll find a way to convert these last informal communities into nice, neat formal ones too, with RTA regulated shippers operating from air conditioned cabins and plastic dhows with electric motors to stop residents being woken. Dubai Dhow City. Can't wait.

Leaders

I suppose most of us have a visceral mistrust of politicians, but the method of dealing with them proposed by the mighty K. Malik, author of that most glorious collection of correspondence brought to us by dint of the earnest labour of New Light Publishers of New Delhi, 1111 Letters for Every Occasion, is quite singular. Write letters of advice to the leaders of all parties, giving them the benefit of direct contact with the electorate they seek to win over to their views. Tell ‘em how it is! And then get stuck into the current government, sharing a new way forward for the country!

In fact, K. Malik’s letters to various Ministers spell out an interesting alternative national agenda. Perhaps India would have been improved had he actually sent these letters rather than selling them to New Light Publishers? We may never know...

A footnote, perhaps interesting or perhaps not: the exhortation to the Sikh Akali party claims that Guru Nanak Dev founded Sikhism to bring together India and Pakistan. That’s interesting, as he died in 1539, a little over four hundred years before Pakistan’s sanguinary foundation. Further proof, should it be needed, that K. Malik does, indeed, exist in a parallel universe that is fundamentally different to our own.

Next week: Love letters.

Letters to the Leaders
People must keep a vigilant eye on the doings and misdoings of the political leaders. We must praise their good works. Also, we should point out their faults and the faults of their policies.

To the Congress Party
Please redeem your pledges of Price rise immediately.
If you do not, your days are numbered.
You can fool some people for all time and all people for some time but you cannot fool all people for all the time.

To the B.J.P.
You have failed to challenge the might of the Congress (I).
Why continue to have nuisance value?

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
Stop insulting Northern India, Hindu and Hinduism. Don’t cut your nose to spite your face.

To the Akali Party
Sikhism and politics do not go together. We must help bring together Hindus and Muslims, India and Pakistan. Guru Nanak made Sikhism for that purpose.

To the Minister for Foreign Affairs
In line with the great ideals of Mahatma Ghandi, we should abolish passports and visas. Let us have open doors to the world. That is the true mission of India.

To the Finance Minister
The word ‘Income-Tax’ should go. It smells of feudalism. It does not suit democracy. Income-Tax should be known as “Public Charity Fund”. And taxpayers should be induced to pay the maximum without coercion. If the government does not trust the people, why should people trust the Government?

To the Minister for Information
Television spells a great danger to the psychological health of the people. Children are wasting too much time seeing TV rather than studying their books. TV should be restricted to Sundays and holidays. It is a great national nuisance.

To the Minister of Agriculture
You must encourage people to become agriculture minded. Agriculture should be made a compulsory subject in schools. Children must grow something in schools or their houses, even on house-tops, to qualify for Board Examination.

Taxi

Right. Here comes a question I've been meaning to ask everyone I know for a while now...

What is WRONG with ‘illegal taxis’? The Dubai Road and Transport Authority (RTA) has been insisting on car poolers jumping through hoops of fire whilst visibly chewing on photocopies of their grandparents buttocks so that they can stop the societal evil of illegal taxis. But the very reason for a market developing in illegal taxis is that there is a clear and unfulfilled market need. Whatever happened to ‘laissez-faire’ – the attitude that built Dubai?

Nobody sensible would take an illegal taxi in a market where there were well-regulated legal taxis that offered a prompt, clean, efficient and pleasant service at a reasonable price. But if someone wants money for a ride and I'm willing to pay it and be outside the regulated environment, then that's my lookout – my risk and my choice to make. The better the ‘regulated’ taxis, the less likely I am to go ‘unregulated’.

If the regulated taxis were a bunch of irresponsible, rude, self-serving bahoos that won't pick up fares, won't travel to a range of places, won't abide by the regulations, don't know their way around and generally try and fleece all and sundry, then I'd be very tempted to do the unregulated thing. Particularly when trying to travel in difficult traffic in what must be growing into one of the world’s most hellish rush hours – an experience unrelieved by the existence of any viable public transport. Particularly cross-Emirate public transport. Because if there were a cost effective viable public transport option, punters would surely be taking that rather than an unofficial taxi! No?

So the very market for unregulated (‘illegal’) taxis is created by the inefficiencies of the regulated (‘legal’) market. If there’s a market in illegal taxis, it’s surely a clear sign of failure on the part of the RTA, isn’t it? Or have I got this all wrong because I’m not a ‘traffic expert’?

Informal markets exist when formal markets fail. And most formal markets start as informal ones. It’s called innovation!

Using regulation to stifle market innovation is something that we've seen before (Skype), but it don't make it any the less ugly...

Toot

I will never fail to lose my sense of marvel and astonishment at the Arab World. It's been a 22-year love affair for me so far (with the occasional unexpected pot hole) - and yet I'm still finding new things around every corner. If I've learned one thing, it's that I've so much yet to learn.

So breakfast today in Amman with pal and colleague Ammouni brought a new discovery, one so basic that it left me breathless with the weight of my ignorance.

Toot.

Now I always thought Toot was a Jordanian blog aggregator, or perhaps even Columbian Marching Powder, but I failed to spot the fruit behind the name. Toot is a pale, slightly greenish fruit, something like an anaemic gooseberry colour that has the shape of a slightly elongated, and smaller, raspberry.

And it's delicious. And I'd never heard of it before. And it's unique. And now I'm going to look out for it wherever I can.

So I am, as the barrister once admonished the judge, none the wiser, but better informed.

I feel slightly better to learn that I got to it before Wikipedia did. But only slightly.

Shill

It's not often I shill for clients on da blog, but I liked this thingette from IBM employee Sacha Chua so I've put it here. Later on today, if I'm lucky, a few of the delegates from this year's Arab Advisors Fifth Annual Media and Convergence Conference will swing by to take a look at it, because I'll have pointed them here.

They'll also be able to read the thought provoking article here, which my mate Gianni turned me onto.

Sacha is a self-confessed member of what we old people like to call Generation Y. It's not a term with which I'm particularly comfortable, but then I've heard even worse epithets. I happen to hate, with a passion, 'digital tribe' and even worse is 'digital native'. The idea that someone grew up in a digital world is interesting, but I don't think that labelling and boxing them is desirable or even funny, clever or mature.

As it happens, I grew up in a digital world myself, but a strange and fast-moving digital world where I was filled with round-eyed astonishment at the things happening around me. I grew up in a world where my school didn't know what number base would be the number base of computing, so I was forced into calculating in binary, octal and duodecimal. Crap - hex won out. I learned to use a computer with a card reader, then a teletype. Later on came coding punch tape for CNC turret presses, eight inch disk drives, 20lb portable computers, memory chips the size of aeroplanes and all the rest of it.

It might not have been Facebook, but it wasn't exactly an 'analogue upbringing' either.

Which might be part of the reason why I find it so intensely irritating to have to watch telcos and telecom vendors trying to 'get to grips with the kids'. They'd be well served to just try a little wide-eyed curiosity themselves and start exploring this brave new world we've all been building, rather than just trying to shoe-horn it into old fashioned revenue models from their heady circuit-switched days.

Here endeth the geek session. Back to being silly tomorrow... promise...

Bumps

It’s a remarkable study in human geography: throughout the Emirates there are to be seen various stages in the development of communities around speed bumps. I do find that interesting: as an inattentive and impossibly inky-fingered schoolkid, I vaguely remember being told about how communities will establish around natural land formations such as the confluence of rivers or trade routes. And, in fact, there is evidence of communities built around trade routes in the Emirates from 3,000 years ago: specifically in the megalithic burial site to be found in Bitnah, which is a village on the wadi system from Masafi to Fujeirah which has, incidentally, been scandalously neglected by the government of Fujeirah. That wadi was the lower, and probably would have been the easiest and therefore principal, crossing of the Emirates from the coast, across the Hajar mountains and over the desert plains, the higher being Wadi Bih from Dibba to RAK.

Today’s trade routes are black-top and almost every set of speed bumps on a busy road will see chaps selling baby-doll pink candy-floss, fruit and vegetables or black mountain honey from rickety carts or packing-case stalls to the cars as they slow down. More established markets, such as those on the RAK road through Umm Al Qawain, put up scaffolding frames and tack corrugated iron roofs on to make more permanent shops. And then you have examples that have turned into semi-settlements, such as the Masafi Friday Market, a speed-bump community on the Dhaid/Masafi road. This now sports some concrete and block buildings, including a mosque and has turned into quite a large on-road retail park.

More established communities are to be found on the Abu Dhabi highway: again these started as speed-bump communities in the days when the highway was a two-lane affair with no camel fencing and some famously wicked speed-bumps that would regularly be adorned with lorries on their side that had come in too fast and lurched off the road. Today, these are small villages that have outlasted the speed-bumps that prompted their foundation. There’s another one of these on the Dhaid highway from Sharjah: a roadside truck-halt kind of community.

I do find it amusing that the UAE has two types of developing communities built on selling people candy-floss...

Sober

Here's a sobering read for anyone that thinks media freedom is a good thing: the World Association of Newspapers represents over 18,000 newspapers and its report into media freedom in the world today cites abuses of freedom of expression on a truly global basis.

"In the Middle East and North Africa, the past six months have been marked by a number of setbacks in the area of press freedom, mainly due to autocratic regimes that do not hesitate to take drastic measures to prevent independent voices from making themselves heard. Bloggers throughout the region continue their relentless battle to spread news and information ignored or censored by the mainstream media."

I do find it interesting that the WAN, a body representing the 'mainstream media', made that comment about bloggers in the Middle East, although I do hasten to point out that this particular blog is involved in a relentless battle to be daft and of no particular value to anyone. There are a number of blogs and websites that are challenging traditional thinking on media ownership and the role of media in the Middle East. Before, back in the good old days, you could just make sure that only trusties could own licenses to publish. Now the very nature of what 'publishing' is has been upended by the Internet. The UAE publishing law is, of course, desperately out of date and we still await new regulations that reflect the world around us - and the UAE isn't alone. Globally, much legislation has fallen behind the rapid transformations and innovations that Internet technologies are driving.

Meanwhile, seven journalists have died in Iraq since November 2007 and Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana, namechecked by the WAN report, was killed by an Israeli tank whose crew couldn't read the word PRESS on his distinctive blue flak jacket. The shell that killed him, shamefully, was an anti-personnel flechette round that launched thousands of tiny, evil little darts buzzing like angry, deadly black steel mosquitoes into the still air around him: a hail of shaped steel shards that cut him down as he stood there with a camera on his shoulder filming his own death.

Editor

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor are the most popular form of giving vent to public grievances; and you should learn how to write them. The letters to the Editor are like any other letters. There is nothing new or special about them. Here are a few samples.

To the Reader

Dear Reader

India is faced with a crisis of character. The dark forces that are creating this crisis should be ruthlessly exposed.

All of you are called upon to give us a helping hand in this crusade of ours to expose injustice, corruption, communalism, casteism, parochialism and all such disruptive ‘isms’ and place the culprits in the dock of public opinion. You should send us news exposing such dark forces operating in your town.

News must be accompanied by your full address and signed pledge that it is true and factual. We assure you that this would be kept confidential and disclosed under no circumstances.

This is your crusade.

Editor


Only Goat Skin

Sir

Please refer to Mr. A. Kumar’s letter (The Hindustan Times, Aug 11). The alleged ‘musk gland of the musk deer’ is nothing but goat skin puffed with coal dust, earth particles and small pebbles sewn and tied with professional tact sprinkled with cheap musk perfume. These are not the ‘testicles’ of male deer as alleged by Mr. Kumar. There is no need to be alarmed about the possibilities of the extinction of deer. This business is in line with other fraudulent business practices in the country.

Yours, etc.

Ram Swarup Goyal

Bus Conductor’s Conduct

Sir,

I was travelling by a Route no 85 bus (1616 express) at about 10am on 3^rd August. The driver was driving the vehicle very rashly and an old woman was about to be crushed to death near the Baird Road bus stop. I requested the conductor to give me the complaint book so that I may write the complaint. He refused to give it to me. He challenged my right to demand the complaint book.

Yours, etc.

Shri Bhagwan Sharma

Art for Art’s Sake

Sir,

Art for art’s sake has been debated by academicians for long. For a breath of change, let’s say – art for people’s sake too. We need not necessarily by committed to socialist realism. Incidentally, what deters us from evolving a cultural policy in tune with national aspirations of the people as Sir Aourobindo visualised long back? As we celebrate the Silver Jubilee of our independence, there could be no fitter tribute to that Yogi.

Yours, etc

A.K. Shukla

Next week: Letters to the Leaders

Evil

I don't know what it is with people and Modhesh. Last year one grumpy blogger even went so far as to refer to our cheery little yellow friend as a relentless tide of infinite-eyed, grinning evil! Some people have no sense of fun!

But the time is upon us again as Modhesh statues start to appear around Dubai. The endearing little chap is the mascot of Dubai's Summer Surprises shopping festival, although his ubiquity appears to annoy certain groups of irritable expatriates. Shame on them for being so grumpy!

Yesterday saw the official press conference to inaugurate this years' festivities and they're sure to include loads of wonderful Modhesh fun. And who could complain at the little chap's cheery ways as the thermometer hits 50C and we sweat our way through a summer of stop start traffic and construction-related mayhem?

Oddly, the press event appears to have generated less than stunning coverage: this government story didn't even make it to Emirates Business 24x7, which is simply amazing. But I'm sure it'll pick up soon enough.

He's got his own website, you know, although all the links appear to be broken...

Whatever, he'll be with us for the next couple of months... everywhere, everyday and in every way... Happy summer, friends!