36 – 28 – 32

These are no vital statistics of a super model... no way …these were the vital statistics of the Middle East, a lovely lady alluring u to the land of yellow and black gold, a land of dreams, promising a great future ahead…For all my confused readers these are just the key figures one ends up following during ones life in the Middle East. Wondering what they are???? Here you go.

On the 6th of September 1996 …

36 Rupees made a $
28 $ cld buy you a barrel of Oil
32 Dirhams was the price of a gram of gold.

A dozen years back on the 6th of September 1996 the fateful day on which I set foot on the sands of Arabia thinking that the greener pastures lay here… how dumb of me, greener pastures in a desert !!! I was probably looking for an oasis. It was exactly the same time the pastures in India began to look fertile… I kinda missed it by about six months…

Like ooll other malayalees I simbbly & blindddly folloooowed the Gulf dream.A dream that empowered you to shift from a 4 Figure salary to a 5 Figure salary overnight...by sheer virtue of the exchange rates and nothing more...

For a person whose only idea of a skyscraper was the 14 Storey LIC building on Mount Road in Madras, here I was, all awed at the 32 storey World Trade Centre building in Dubai. Today its dwarfed amongst its newer and much taller cousins like the Emirates Towers, Dusit and the likes and the relatively new and still growing Burj Dubai already at 688 M.

Just as the buildings grew taller and the cityscapes saw a sea of change propelled by the petro dollar, so has the vital statistics of the alluring lady of the Middle East been disfigured ...and it reads something like this today …. 45 – 106 –99… (Use the same correlation as above). How ugly and unattractive the Middle East has become 12 years on…