The dark side emerges ...

[Reeyo]

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

 

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

 

 

 

Continue ..: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

[Alpha Blondy]

what nonsense!

 

the west is at it again......its not impressing anyone, laakin.

[Reeyo]

Alpha: Believe it or not believe it. All I know is that city is unnatural.

 

III. Hidden in plain view

 

 

 

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

 

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

 

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

[Alpha Blondy]

the different dubais, the aesthetics of its buildings, social underbelly within etc etc.......

 

what about the depraved nature of cities in the west.....with their decadence, their gated communities, their ethnic enclave ghettos that ''revanchist'' white-pop-collar-nouveau riche-neo-intelligentsia gentrifiers seek to destroy, the subterranean evils that lurk within....

 

please isku xishood and see things for what they are! ma fahantahay?

[Reeyo]

Blessed..?

[Reeyo]

Alpha Blondy;912313 wrote:

the different dubais, the aesthetics of its buildings, social underbelly within etc etc.......

 

what about the depraved nature of cities in the west.....with their decadence, their gated communities, their ethnic enclave ghettos that ''revanchist'' white-pop-collar-nouveau riche-neo-intelligentsia gentrifiers seek to destroy, the subterranean evils that lurk within....

 

please isku xishood and see things for what they are! ma fahantahay?

Did you read the article? Johann Hari is a great writer. So dry yet humorous.

[Wadani]

Alpha, though I do usually agree with ur criticisms of the West, ur overreaching in this case.There is no comparision between how the social underclasses in the Dubai compared to the West. As the article accurately portrays these migrant workers are nothing but indentured slaves.

[N.O.R.F]

Dubai is a remarkable story and a great modern city.

 

These guys are not slaves. They came over to work for the money they earn. They're paid what is on their contract.

 

The probelm with the west is that it is difficult for them to understand how an Arab city could be more developed than their cities.

 

The real problem in Dubai is greed. There is no control on what major coorporations (banks etc) or utility companies charge.

 

The article is just rehashing old articles.

[Alpha Blondy]

Reeyo;912315 wrote:

Did you read the article? Johann Hari is a great writer. So dry yet humorous.

this man is a plagiariser and epitomises the liberal media's PC culture crusade. NO THANKS!

[Alpha Blondy]

N.O.R.F;912324 wrote:

 

The probelm with the west is that it is difficult for them to understand how an Arab city could be more developed than their cities.

 

+100

[Alpha Blondy]

Wadani;912318 wrote:

Alpha, though I do usually agree with ur criticisms of the West, ur overreaching in this case.There is no comparision between how the social underclasses in the Dubai compared to the West. As the article accurately portrays these migrant workers are nothing but

indentured slaves

.

as opposed to the tens of thousands black and ethnics denied the opportunity to proposer in the workplace? i take it, you're not familiar with, the glass-ceiling phenomena....?

 

look at London's ethnic segmentation of the labour market and you'll soon realise all the blue-collar minimum wage jobs are reserved for blacks and ethnics, particularly those still considered worthy of working and within the fold. the open-door policy of the EU and the recent influx of eastern europeans with their 'cheaper by the dozen' mantras has completely relegated many blacks and ethnics to the back of the pecking order. you speak of indentured slaves but what is life without any employment? people are leaving and i welcome this.

[nuune]

Horrible article, terrible would be the best word to describe.

 

Just the time this article was written, I was in Dubai & Abu Dhabi, and passing by any money transfer branches crowded by Asians sending money to their country, what are they sending anyway, SAND according to the article, yes, sand.

[Alpha Blondy]

nuune;912338 wrote:

Horrible article, terrible would be the best word to describe.

 

Just the time this article was written, I was in Dubai & Abu Dhabi, and passing by any money transfer branches crowded by Asians sending money to their country, what are they sending anyway, SAND according to the article, yes, sand.

like those self-appointed-universalist-white apologists whose chronic paternalism has completely neutered and emasculated blacks the world over, these self-serving individuals, of which no doubt, mr.hari is first among equals, now want to tell us how we ought to live our lives. they use these human rights and Millenium Development Goals compliant mantras and fear-mongering tactics to shoo away any potential investment. they'd rather we are wholly dependent on them. NO THANKS.

[Blessed]

Reeyo,

The title reminds me of the 'Dark knight rises' and when I realised what it was about, I remembered the Dubai movie which ironically gave a better insight into the complex lives of Dubaites. If you really want to know about a society, your best teacher is experience; live and work with the people. The article, as with most articles about Muslim countries / society is full of exaggerated half-truths.

 

nuune,

That many of these towers are owned by rich Indian migrants is never told as well.

[Wadani]

Alpha Blondy;912336 wrote:

as opposed to the tens of thousands black and ethnics denied the opportunity to proposer in the workplace? i take it, you're not familiar with, the glass-ceiling phenomena....?

 

look at London's ethnic segmentation of the labour market and you'll soon realise all the blue-collar minimum wage jobs are reserved for blacks and ethnics, particularly those still considered worthy of working and within the fold. the open-door policy of the EU and the recent influx of eastern europeans with their 'cheaper by the dozen' mantras has completely relegated many blacks and ethnics to the back of the pecking order. you speak of indentured slaves but what is life without any employment? people are leaving and i welcome this.

Ofcourse Im familiar with the glass-ceiling phenomena, after all im a black youth who grew up in one of the ethnic slums of Canada. It's just that im not sure if unemployment, in the form it's experienced by minorites in the west with all of its free hand outs, is worse than the slave-like conditions of the middle east. But I geuss in the end u and nuune r right; for many of these migrants making a living in deplorable conditions is better than no income at all.