Quickening

The Caravan has a great excerpt from Syed Ali’s Dubai: Gilded Cage:

For the vast majority of second-generation expatriates I interviewed, citizenship is a non-issue. They accept, however grudgingly, their second-class status in Dubai. They live their lives in a place where they are always in a liminal or in-between state, where their existence is defined by a permanent condition of legal and social precariousness. And these expatriates for the most part are comfortable with this.

The utter strangeness of growing up in transience, surrounded by strictly-segmented luxury and further away, war, never dawned on me until I left. As my awareness grew, so did the world’s, and suddenly Dubai was the glitziest brand of them all.

Reporting has predictably veered between fawning and schadenfreude, with Johann Hari’s vile sensationalism and thinly-veiled disdain for free markets (especially in the developing world, apparently) thrown in for good measure. On the other hand, Syed Ali’s measured approach and nuanced interviews with a broad spectrum of subjects has me all eyes. I’m looking forward to this read; it’s been a long time coming.