AN UNFORGETTABLE TRIP - " Transiting through Dubai"

I was lucky to visit Afghanisthan recently. I had the most unbelievable trip to Faizabad, Bharak and Jurm,on a project as a media consultant, for capacity building of local journalists. You are on the second page from the diary of that unforgettable trip ***

And here I must pause. This page is not at all about Kabul but a transit station that made my trip to Afghanistan even more meaningful. I was flying to Afghanistan via Dubai.This is where my husband is employed at the moment. After leaving the Army he joined a lifestyle company, as an Operations Manager and I was visiting him for the first time ever since he left in August.

I am fairly well travelled to be in awe of any foreign country and wasn’t expecting anything unusual now. I had the fondest memories of the Virgin Islands and Vancouver Islands spanning the Atlantic and the Pacific – A trip I always thought would be the most memorable and a high point of my life, in its beauty, its fun and in the joy of exploring a new world for the first time. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. If I had anything coming it was the sheer shock of gross opulence smacking at my face.

I recalled a picture of Daud Ibrahim's daughter, circulated on the net once. She was bedecked in an obscene amount of gold finery, on her wedding day. Instead of looking beautiful in them, she looked just the opposite.She stoked an immediate urge of throwing up in me... You know the feeling when you gorge too much , far to much on sumptous rich food ? In exactly the same way, a kind of breathlessness and giddiness struck me as I started discovering what Dubai was all about.

It was as if all the treasures of the world were amassed, in this little space, in the desert of Arabia. It was horded in profusion with things sprawling and spilling, falling and being trudged over for lack of any more legroom and yet there was still more spilling in … Dubai has achieved this dubious distiction only in the last 50years incidentally.It is only after the discovery of oil in these parts that it got transformed into the mecca for the well heeled shopholics.Today the rich and famous vie to buy an upmarket villa here. From Brad Pitt to Benaizer Bhutto and Shah Rukh Khan, none would have thought as much though just two decaded ago , when it was a dry waste land as much as Afghanistan.

Today Dubai stnds as a shoppers paradise . Much as it made me happy for the locals who has run into this fortune and find themselves living in such affluence,my head still teeming with stories of the scarcity and impoverishment of Afghanistan couldn’t take the unkind contrast.

Its synthetic life , its sprawling malls, its 100%air-conditioned environment , its wide roads and streaming traffic, its wealth ,its affluence , its freedom for fun and joy filled my eyes with tears. So much and so little, within a span of a just a few thousand kms! I understood inequity in its global context for the first time.