Anyone Fancy A Change? Etisalat Doesn't!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The UAE's 'incumbent' telco, Etisalat, has managed to neatly underline quite how fearful it is of mobile number portability by trying to block its competitor's 'change' campaign.

Mobile number portability - the ability to change operator without changing your number - should arguably have come to the UAE much sooner: it's a key element of any sensible competitive market and regulatory regime. It was first talked about back in 2009, in fact. Du has always said it wasn't the one dragging heels around here and that makes perfect sense - incumbents always face the challenge of 'churn', the process whereby harried and fed up customers migrate to competitors, so the longer they can delay MNP and preserve that barrier to entry, the better.

Worse, many, many people in the UAE already carry two devices - one Du and one Etisalat. It's one reason behind the country's remarkably high mobile penetration. But it also gives subscribers a taste of the service offered by the competitor.

So Du, on the news that MNP would finally be brought in, started a natty little campaign offering to provide information to people who text CHANGE to 3553. Etisalat responded by blocking that number. Regulator TRA promptly fined Etisalat (sum, of course, undisclosed) which then grudgingly unblocked the number. The National reports on the whole farago with glee - as does Kipp.

Great service, great value, consumer choice. These are all good things, no? Values for any company to aspire to! It's just that, well, someone doesn't really seem to be entering into the spirit of things around here, do they?

Given the choice, keeping your number, would you change?

Who Moved My Shiny?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Oi! You! Where do you think you're going?"
"I'm moving in to my new place. I've got a Shiny, I have!"
"Not without a moving in/moving out form you haven't! Where is it?"
"I haven't got 'it' whatever 'it' is!"
"Well then, you can't move in, can you? If you haven't got a moving in/moving out form, duly completed and submitted five days before you move, you can't move. It's quite clear."
"What's quite clear? Nobody told me about this!"
"It's in black and white, in the regulations. Duly available to any member of the public who presents himself to the regulation archive and requests a copy."
"Where's the regulation archive?"
"We don't know. We lost it. We'd have put it in The Archive, but we're turning that into a shopping mall. Anyway, that's beside the point. No moving in/moving out form, no move."
"But this is mine. I bought it. Freehold."
"Usufruct."
"I'm sorry?"
"Usufruct. Not freehold. That's in the regulations, too. Which gives us the right to insist on you completing a moving in/moving out form before you move in. And tell you what colour you can paint your Shiny and all the other stuff we get up to when we conjure up daft new schemes and ideas."
"In the advert, it didn't say 'Dare to dream, live to love, enjoy a scintillating lifestyle in paradisical sunshine by the way it's usufruct so you can't even move in without filling in some arbitrary form to pander to some odious jobsworth who couldn't even organise a shawarma stand."
"Okay, that's it, mate. You can't say shawarma to me like that. I'm only doing my job and I won't have random strangers throwing obscenities at me. I'm calling the law, I am."
"What about this lorry and all my stuff?"
"Take 'em back. You'll not need 'em for a while anyway once the law get hold of you. Your feet aren't going to touch the floor. 'Hello, police? I'd like to lodge a complaint against someone who just said 'shawarma' to me. I know, I know. I am indeed grievously insulted. Right away. Thank you, officer.' Right, mate, I'll give you shawarma, so'n I will."
"Have you seriously just called the police and complained I said 'shawarma' to you?"
"You can pick up a copy of the moving in/moving out form on your way down to the nick or you can fill in the online form and print that out to submit an application for the moving in/moving out form at the same office. You can suit yourself, I've had enough of standing around being insulted by the likes of you. Good day to you."

In case the above doesn't make much sense this link to the moving/in moving out form story might help and this one to the shawarma insult story may shed further light in the gloom. 

Expo 2020: Dubai's 'Social Bid'

(Photo credit: @cpe)

This is the week Dubai goes Expo 2020 bonkers and if you thought the noise level was already high, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Five cities originally launched bids to host Expo 2020 - the latest in a long string of 'World Fairs' that started with the original World's Fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park. The bids are evaluated by the body governing Expo, the BIE (Bureau of International Expositions) and voted on by the 167 member states. This vote, as anyone in Dubai except the most dedicated of ostriches will know, takes place Wednesday 27th November and will pick a winner from Dubai, Sao Paolo, Yekaterinburg and Izmir. Thailand's bid, the city of Ayutthaya, was withdrawn earlier this year.

Dubai has been pretty hardcore with its bid. The city's made no secret of the fact it wants this and intends to get it - and a remarkable package of infrastructure and a relentless tide of promotional activity have been flung into the fray. The stakes are high - expo sites typically span hundreds of acres and the events attract tens of millions of visitors. Has Dubai got what it takes?

If social media is anything to go by, yes it has. Because its competition doesn't seem to have got the hang of the whole 'inclusion' concept.

Let's take Turkey's Izmir. The city has a website with all the right buttons, as well as quite an annoying interstitial that promotes its Facebook page. With over 73,000 likes, there's precious little sign of engagement but a high octane broadcast of 'support our bid' type messages rather than any attempt to foster or encourage a debate around the Izmir bid's theme of improving healthcare. Izmir's YouTube Channel is also on broadcast with a lot of 'talking heads' garnering typical views in the low tens and a couple of slick ads with higher views. Again, it's all about mememe.  It's hardly any better over on Twitter, where a tad over 6,000 followers receive broadcasts on supporting the bid. The Izmir Twitter profile does suggest you might like to sign the 'Health For All Manifesto', which on cursory inspection appears to reason that if you support Izmir's bid, it would be good for global health. Hosted on WeSignIt, the manifesto has attracted 522 signatures.

It's hardly compelling, is it?

Yekaterinburg is arguably Dubai's toughest competitor. It's Russia's fourth largest city and has a complex and diverse history, including being the site of the murder of the Romanovs. The vanilla template website doesn't really sparkle and isn't even particularly informative. Facebook offers 1,459 likes and again is more of a tourist board broadcast than any attempt to foster engagement around the bid's theme of The Global Mind. There is, for some odd reason, a picture of a squirrel. With under 500 followers, the city's Twitter account is just posting the same images as Facebook. YouTube hasn't really sparked inspiration, not even the slickly produced 'Global Mind Adventure'. There's certainly no sign of community involvement - or any invitation to involvement.

As far as I can tell, Sao Paolo's website is down or dead and its Facebook page, with a tad over 4,000 likes, hasn't seen a post since June. YouTube hasn't been fed a new video in five months, either. And its 162 Twitter followers have also lacked companionship since June. If you just saw Sao Paolo's online presence, you'd be forgiven for thinking they've given up and gone home for a Feijoada.

And so on to The City That Gave The World Modhesh. How's Dubai shaping up in the online stakes - and, more importantly, is there any sign that the city actually wants to talk about its theme rather than just nag people to support its bid?

Over 58,000 followers on Twitter and 721,000 likes on Facebook appear to be saying something. Yes, we know it's not all about the numbers, but there's a question of scale here. Uniquely, Dubai's using Instagram, with over 9,000 followers. There's participation, community and engagement going on over at the Twitter account, including a couple of cheeky tweets from 'Our Dave'. Facebook's similarly lively, with community events, stunts (the inevitable Guinness book of records stunt) and widespread public participation very much in evidence. The Dubai bid's theme is 'Connecting Minds, Creating the Future', with sustainability, mobility and opportunity as sub-themes. The website features a number of thinkers talking about these themes. YouTube hasn't seen an upload in a while, but the content there again goes beyond tourist board images and 'back our bid' calls.

In fact, of all four bids, it has to be said that Dubai Expo 2020 online has the strongest sense of community and broad public participation of any of 'em. It's by far the most active and popular campaign on social platforms by a huge margin. It could do more and be a great deal slicker, without doubt. There is a huge opportunity to build further on what has already been established. But what's there is streets ahead of its rivals.

From its online presence alone, Dubai's the only Expo 2020 bidder that has clear evidence of coming together as a community in support of the city's bid - and a genuine interest in fostering discussion, debate and thought around its theme.

I must have mislaid my cynicism pills. Where did I put those blasted things?

Book Post: The Spies Of Shemlan

The frontispiece of my prized copy of Arabia Felix. 

Note TE Lawrence was, at the time he wrote his 

foreword for Thomas' book, going under the name TE Shaw.

Conceived with the genuine intention of building bridges between the British officer and governing class and the people of the Arab World, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) was founded by noted Arabist Bertram Thomas - the author of Arabia Felix, a friend of TE Lawrence's and very much a member of the 'Middle East gang' of prominent arabists connected with, among other things, Military Intelligence (the MI in MI5 and MI6). Storrs, Lawrence, Wingate, Thomas, Stark, Bell - these names trip off the tongue, but they were a highly influential little bunch of interconnected people swimming in a pond of finite size.

It's this connection with intelligence that's so hard to shake, right from the very conception of MECAS. While it may have had lofty aims, there was a whiff of sulphur connected to figures such as Thomas and his contemporary, Harry St John Bridger Philby - father of the notorious 'Kim' Philby, a man who has been connected with MECAS although it appears the connection was tenuous at best. Philby lived in Beirut for a time working for The Economist (and spying) and was said to have socialised with MECAS students. He never did study at the school.

But George Blake did. And Blake was one of the most notorious spies of the Cold War.

It was Blake who was to give the Centre a high profile student to justify Kamal Jumblatt’s assertion that MECAS was ‘A school for spies’. Blake, born George Behar in 1922, is still alive, living in exile in Moscow. He is said to have betrayed over 400 British spies in his remarkable career as a Soviet double agent - a career that ended with his in camera trial and subsequent 42-year prison sentence. The sentence was notably long, the judge finding him guilty on three separate counts of spying and handing out three maximum sentences. Newspapers at the time claimed the sentence represented a year for every British spy killed as a result of Blake's many betrayals but, fun though it sounds, it appears the claim was editorial embellishment.

A highly resourceful man who had enjoyed a remarkable career with the Dutch resistance in the war, Blake conspired to escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in October 1966 and fled to Moscow via East Germany.

But as far as the Lebanese were concerned, it just went to prove what they’d always suspected. Up there in Shemlan, was The British Spy School. And people on the mountain still call it that – even though the Centre has long been closed and its building converted to house an orphanage. The legend lives on.

It's actually how I first found the MECAS building in Shemlan. We were looking for the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, but understanding dawned on the puzzled face of the man we asked for directions, "Oh, you mean the British spy school!" he said.

By then I knew MECAS was going to be at the very centre of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. Which, incidentally, you can buy here either as an ebook or in print. See what I did there? Subtle, me...

Just A Thought...

Cover of Kate Bush

So I've been thinking about this blog thing for a while. I've enjoyed myself over the years (I've been feeding this little fire for over SIX years now and likely written more words for it than I have for my books!), generally amused myself greatly and anecdotally have gathered I have occasionally provided amusement (and irritation) to others.

Nothing like the amusement provoked by the wicked and scurrilous Pan Arabia Enquirer, for instance, with its gigantic, tottering piles of 400,000 page views a month, but I have managed some mild jollity among a small, selective band of discerning blog readers and a much larger troupe of disappointed searchers for more sensible things hornswoggled by Google into emerging here rather than somewhere more useful.

I never had an objective in it all, as such. For someone whose day job revolves around defining communications objectives and the like, it's been refreshing. A little like GeekFest, I suppose it has been an anti-PR activity that has come by sheer error to have some sort of reputational value, although any reputational plus has been balanced by the alarm and calumny of being quite as frank as I have on occasion been in here. What makes it special, as Kate Bush tells us, makes it dangerous.

I don't mean to alarm you, by the way. I'm not jacking it in or anything like that. But I am perhaps going to destroy any vestigial traffic by spending more time on what has become the most intense focus in my life - books. Or more accurately, narrative.

I'm going to start posting book reviews, for instance. I've wasted them over at GoodReads in the same way a TripAdvisor review is wasted - just another voice in the thousands of contributions. I'd rather have 'em here in my own archive, tell the truth. We'll see where that takes us, but if you want to submit your book for review, I wouldn't expect much sugar-coating from around here.

Oh, I'm going to go on slapping Gulf News for being drooling morons and playing with things that pass by on life's conveyor belt and make you wonder quite what it's all about. How could I not? But I'm doing more and more book stuff in my life and I think that's going to be represented here more.

Sorry if that's not good news - I know book posts and the like kill blog traffic more effectively than the Car Eating Carrion Crow of Cephalon Cinque - but it's sort of where I'm headed and I've become quite fond of my blog, so where I'm headed, I guess the blog'll come too - peeing on the lamp posts and sniffing other blog's bums...

That's all folks...

PS: I found an excuse to put a picture of Kate Bush on the blog. My life is complete...

The ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair. Oh Yeah.

UPDATE

With rain forecast for Dubai tomorrow (Saturday) and no indoor venue available, the ExpatWoman Family Fair has been rescheduled to Jan 25th (the next sensible date to hold it). So I won't be signing books and refusing to wear a Santa hat, but will provide more info nearer the rescheduled date.

UPDATE 2 
(Saturday evening)
Unbelievable. Not a drop of rain fell all day. Some fluffy clouds, a couple of darker ones, but no rain at all or even realistic chance of rain. EW took the right decision - given the forecast - for sure, but how could the forecast have been so signally wrong? Damn the weatherman!

Trips off the old tongue, don't it? This Saturday - the 23rd November - will see ExpatWoman.com hosting their annual festive shindig at Dubai's Polo & Equestrian Club, opposite Arabian Ranches. Not normally something I'd be burbling about on the blog, but there's something special in store for visitors this year.

Oh yes.

From 10.30am to 4.30pm, you have the opportunity to visit Santa's Grotto, get the kids face painted and visit various stalls selling festive femed crafts and goodies. There's a petting zoo, so little Johnny has the chance to get savagely mauled by a Chinchilla. In short, it's the usual Craggy Island deal including, we can only hope, a goat stuck in the Ferris wheel. Except, of course, it's on a Dubai scale, with nigh on a hundred stalls and a polo match thrown in.

But that's not all by any means. Because this year you can make your way over to the golden podium upon which shall rest copies of Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. These shall be signed and given over to unsuspecting members of the general public in return for Reasonable Emolument. They make, needless to say, perfect Christmas presents, ideal gifts for friends and family and fabulously combustible material for igniting the Yule log.

It wasn't my idea, honest. I was chatting with the ExpatWoman gang and they came up with the scheme in jest. Like all too many jests, it has become an horrific reality. I have made it clear: I'll sign books happily, but I'm not wearing the bloody santa hat.

See you there!

The Scatter Here Is Too Great: In Conversation With Bilal Tanweer

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last night marked the final day of the Sharjah International Book Fair 2013 and the pre-launch of Bilal Tanweer's debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great. The fair was silly enough to foist me on Bilal as his host and we decided on a Q&A about the book and a reading or two as a suitable way to pass an hour on a Saturday evening.

The actual launch will take place in Goa, with Random House presumably splashing out for luxury yachts, dancing girls, champagne and cake. And then there are launches in London, Paris and New York. Let's face it, start in Sharjah and you can hardly go wrong in your upwards trajectory of launch events.

Bilal managed to dig up an ARC (Advance Review Copy, silly) for me earlier in the week, which rather put the pressure on given my already extensive TBR (To Be Read list. DO try and keep up with the jargon, would you?) and beta reading commitments. The book was a pleasure to read (I was its first 'general public' reader as it's still in production) - I accused Bilal of doing the same to the good people of Karachi as James Joyce had done to Dubliners with Ulysses and he couldn't muster any disagreement ("When a dog fouls the carpet, you rub its nose in it. Ulysses was my attempt to do the same for the Irish people") - The Scatter Here is Too Great is a book with a varied cast of characters muddling through in a mixture of joy, horror, sickness, health, youth and old age. It's rarely a book that spares the reader strong and pungent description of a city that Bilal admits he loves and loathes.

From the little boy who is teased for his teeth and called parrot, parrot through to the repo man in his immersion in an increasingly violent cycle as he struggles through life, the book is packed with horror and violence, yet there's also life, laughter and love in there. It's a heady mixture of influences, characters and cameos. The violence is rarely explicit, yet implied throughout the book.

And so we talked about it, about these people and the city that spawned them, the bomb that forms the hole in the windscreen that all these cracked lives revolve around as they dance their dance of life and death. Tempus duly fugitted and we found ourselves standing blinking at the end of Q&A with the audience.

An odd but rewarding week, then, in which I have been introduced to two charming Pakistani writers whose work I have enjoyed and whose company it has been a pleasure to find myself in.

In the meantime, Jashanmal sold out of their SIBF stock of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and that made me glad...

Guest Book Post: Bubblecow On Show - Don't Tell

There’s a critical problem dooming your book and you may not even realize!

At BubbleCow, we’ve edited more than 800 books. That’s a lot of books! One thing that this unique level of editing allows is for us to see beyond the problems with any single book and look at the wider picture.

That’s how we know that many writers face a problem that they don’t even understand exists.

The problem is… Emotion!

To be more precise, the problem is making your readers feel REAL emotion.

We are not talking about readers feeling emotion for a character, along the lines of ‘Oh, how sad that they died’, but your words and story triggering a true emotion in a reader.

I know this all sounds wishy washy, but stick with me.

I am sure you’ve read a book that made you cry! Think about it. I am betting that if a book has made you cry that you can still remember that book to this day. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can still recall the exact moment you were reading that book, as tears rolled down your cheeks.

That’s the writer triggering true emotion. That’s the writer delving into your heart and ripping out feelings that leave you emotionally altered…. Now that’s writing!

If you are writing from a third person perspective (that is when the narrator is separate from the story and not one of the characters in your book, that’s first person), then you probably face a problem that you’ve never considered.

Writers become so consumed by TELLING the story, that they forget that the reader is actually part of the process. The reader is part of the story. They are not a passive observer; they are an active component in the process. The moment your reader becomes passive, they turn off, get bored and, eventually, stop reading.

If you TELL a reader that a character is sad, all you do is add a twist to the plot. What you don’t do is make the reader feel the sadness of your character.

This is important. There’s a world of difference between a reader knowing the character is sad and FEELING the character’s sadness.

What you must do, if you are to trigger emotion in a reader, is SHOW them how the character is reacting and then let the reader fill in the gaps.

If… you write with emotional honesty and with a universal truth, the character’s actions will trigger an emotion in the reader. On feeling this emotion, the reader is immediately engaged with your work on a new level.

In other words, by SHOWING not TELLING you are creating a narrative space between the reader and the characters. Because you are not telling the reader how to think and feel this leaves a narrative gap. The reader then leans into this gap and fills it with their own emotion.
Ok… These are big words, but let me show you an example.

Let’s imagine a scene where a young boy has just opened a birthday present to find a book he has been asking for all year.

Here’s the scene written with TELL:


John lifted the present from the table. His heart was filled with joy. He was happy to see the brightly colored wrapping paper. He pushed his finger into the paper and ripped a tiny hole. He was excited. He peeked inside, his heart racing with anticipation. Unable to control himself he ripped open the paper to find the book he had been dreaming of reading.


OK, not Shakespeare but you get my drift.

Now let’s look a little closer at what I’ve written. In the second sentence, we TELL the reader that John’s heart was ‘filled with joy’. In the next sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘happy’. In the fifth sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘excited’ and in the next, that his ‘heart was racing’.
This is a lot of TELL and leaves no space between John and the reader. In this section we are being told by the writer how John is feeling. We are not allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Now… here’s the same scene with all the TELL removed and replaced by SHOW:

John lifted the present from the table. It was a small package wrapped in red and blue wrapping paper, the colors creating a smooth swirl under his fingers. A smile crept onto his lips as he brushed the paper. He glanced from the present to his mother, his grin spreading to a smile. He held the present at arms length for a moment, his hand shaking. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, small breaths pushing from his lips.

The boy returned his gaze to the present. He removed his left hand and extended his middle finger into a poke. His head moved forward, his expression now one of concentration. His finger pushed at the paper, ripping a tiny hole. He leaned in even further, peering into the darkness.

A slight squeal slipped from his lips, an explosion of a smile on his face. Holding the present with his right hand, he ripped at the paper with his left. Long strips came away and were discarded to the floor. A small brown book sat in his right hand. John brushed the cover with the tips of the fingers on his left hand. He stood motionless for a moment, his eyes glistening with moisture. He looked at his mother and mouthed the words ‘thank you’.


The first thing to notice is that the scene is longer. The reason is that the moment we can no longer short cut by simply TELLING the reader what is happening, we are forced to add in description. This is what I call ‘crafting’. I have tried to conjure an image in your mind. If I am not going to write ‘John opened the present’, then I need to accept that I need more words.

The second thing of note is that I’ve tried to write with an emotional truth. I’ve tried to remember what it felt like to receive a present as a child. I’ve also plumbed my own memories of my own children receiving presents. The result, I hope, is a scene that has a universal truth. If I have managed to access this truth, this scene should trigger an emotion in the reader.

Finally, I’ve created a space between John and the reader. I’ve not TOLD you how John is feeling, I’ve just described his actions. It is left to the reader to interpret these actions. This is where I hope to trigger the emotion in the reader. As the reader fills the gap they are forced to tap into their own feelings of the joy of receiving a present. If I’ve managed it, then this suddenly turns into a powerful scene.

And that’s Show, Don’t Tell in action.

I feel strongly that this single technique can turn the most pedestrian of books into an engaging work that readers will remember. No, let’s scrub that. I know that this is true. I’ve seen it happen time and again. In fact, I’ve based our whole business on it! At BubbleCow, Show, Don’t Tell, is the backbone of the editorial approach we take to books written in third person. In fact, we feel it is so important, that we have created a free book to help teach writers how to use this technique in their own writing.

Let’s finish with a little writing trick that can work wonders. It’s called the ‘camera technique’. When writing a scene, imagine you are observing the scene through a camera. Now, just write what the cameraman can see. No thoughts, no short cuts, just the action. The result will be a scene packed full of SHOW and devoid of TELL.


Gary Smailes is the owner of BubbleCow, a company that helps self-publishing writers to produce publishable books. They provide book editing and proofreading.

In Conversation With Mohsin Hamid

Cover of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I'll have to be honest here: I was dreading meeting Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. I had read his second novel, the Booker-nominated The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with enormous enjoyment.

Given the man behind the book was a Princeton-educated management consultant (a species for which I have an instant aversion), I couldn't quite imagine what I was walking into when I agreed to host his appearance at the Sharjah International Book Fair, but it was probably something around a bi-cultural jerk in a suit with an affected proto-American drawl and a superiority complex.

Quite why I ever thought that was the case is beyond me, but then I was the bloke prepared to batter the world's most pleasant literary agent on stage with a tyre lever, so I've got form in the 'getting these things horribly wrong' stakes.

Mohsin Hamid turned out, of course, to be charming, affable, witty and passionate - a sparkling intelligence with an abiding curiosity. The accent was more British than anything else, a product of Pakistan's school system. We quickly agreed on how we would structure our chat and took to the two chairs on stage. We ran through Mohsin's motivations in writing, his first book, Moth Smoke, which he had taken seven years to complete and which gained him near-instant prominence before The Reluctant Fundamentalist cemented his reputation as a startlingly original writer who creates strong voices that subtly direct us to ask ourselves difficult questions we might otherwise conveniently avoid.

We talked about using 'voices' in writing and how Mohsin had consistently made life difficult for himself by choosing unusual voices and structures in his writing - about the influence of living in London, the US and Lahore and always writing about the place you weren't in, secularism and Lahore's underground scene and about how you watch your book being turned into a Hollywood movie. The time flew.

Mohsin read from the opening of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and I got something of a shock. I'd seen that voice as a sing-song Pakistani accent but Mohsin cleared that up as completely as he'd confounded my mean-minded expectation of him: from reduced circumstances, our man has a slightly old-school colonial Englishness to him. He's not jabbering, his voice is measured and reflects the reassurance he constantly offers his clearly nervous dinner guest. Given the entire book is a monologue, that voice cleverly modulated between the present day conversation and the reminiscence of a tragic love affair, the revelation was not inconsiderable. As Mohsin pointed out, everyone puts something of themselves into reading a well-written book and thereby changes it and as a consequence takes away something different, too.

We also talked about Mohsin's new book, How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia and how he struggled with the book's format before he came about the idea of writing it in the second person in the style of a self-help book. We timed out - the room was needed for the next gig and we had to cut questions from the audience short all too quickly. I blame the sloppy moderator myself.

If you missed it, you missed a highly entertaining hour listening to a charming, interesting and self-deprecating man whose work is as remarkable as it is readable. So sucks to you.

I would argue SIBF hasn't done enough to promote the author events taking place there - but if you missed Mohsin, you can still catch up with another Pakistani writer from the 'Lahore scene' on Saturday as I try and mess up the launch of Bilal Tanweer's The Scatter Here is Too Great. We'll be doing a fireside chat (minus the fireside, clearly), a reading and generally celebrating the release of this new novel by Random House.

That's November 16th, 7:15-8:15pm, the Book Forum at Sharjah Exhibition Centre in Al Nahda. There's no excuse not to come from Dubai, the traffic's fine on a Saturday evening.

Neologist Nomenclature

(Photo credit: Frank Kehren)

If you searched 'Neologist nomenclature' and you're for real, I apologise. I just wasted your time.

Hot on the heels of the news Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority is to commence a mega-project to name some 22,000 of the city's streets comes Abu Dhabi's pledge to do the very same thing. The two cities have long had a street numbering system in place, but now we're going to get real road names.

As eny fule no, navigation in the Gulf has traditionally been a matter of using landmarks. I recall with delight the early days of my life tramping around the region and discovering I was to spend my day looking for 'the red office building to the right of French Corner, just down Talateen Street from the big Pepsi hoarding' and similar locations. I spent many a joyous hour in Riyadh's insane traffic (back then, they'd shove you from behind into a roundabout if you hesitated in joining the choking stream), perplexed and deeply lost. This is also, incidentally, frequently how I pass my time in Abu Dhabi, the words 'don't worry, it's really easy to find' instantly plunging icy shards of horror into my soul.

Those popular landmarks were to lend their names to roundabouts and roads, areas even. So Dubai, for instance, gained 'Bank Street', 'Budgie Roundabout', 'Chicago Beach', 'Fish Roundabout' and the like. Sharjah got 'Mothercat', 'Flying Saucer' and - of course - 'National Paints'.

Now they're all going to be renamed. Sharjah already renamed all its roundabouts as squares years ago, to the perplexity of many. And it already has street names, each more impenetrable than the last. This has also been the case in Riyadh, where long-standing roads such as 'Pepsi Cola' and 'Airport' have been renamed with dignitaries' full names. The joy of finding out you actually wanted Abdulaziz bin Sultan bin Abdulrahman Al Saud street when you finally made your way to Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman bin Sultan Al Saud street was always a marvel to behold.

And so, I fear, it will be in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The usual pandering will take place and we'll start with Prominent People With Long Names. Then great historical figures - the usual astrologers, mathematicians, travellers (hands up who wants to live in Ibn Battuta Street, then?) and transmuters of lead to gold. Then they'll get desperate and start using desert animals and the like. If I know Dubai, there'll be an auction to let companies sponsor a street name.

I can't keep up. I'm already having issues remembering what I'm supposed to call the Emirates Road these days, let alone Diyafah street and, of course, remembering it's now the Al Fahidi Cultural Neighbourhood. Like many others, I suspect, I'll likely keep directing people using the Emarat before Satwa Bus Station rather than whatever new name gets slapped on the street our office building is on.

Why they don't use the 'popular' names, I'll never know. Although I always thought 'Budgie Roundabout' disrespectful - especially with the descriptor popularly appended...