Smells like an Indian

Indian men in the Gulf have a problem with body odour. I’ve faced it, my friends have faced it and my friends’ friends have faced it.
The spicy food we eat and the extreme temperature here means we sweat more and the sweat stinks.
However, what’s bothering me is the ‘in the Gulf’ qualifier .
Do Indian men have a problem with body odour? Period.
Is body odour simply acceptable and part of the olfactory culture of India?
Has the perfume industry, with relentless drive, altered the way humans believe they should smell?
In the Gulf though, spray big time.

Abu Dhabi makes Dubai another Sharjah

Back in the day, when Dubai was booming, the whites would mock the Indians for living in Sharjah and working in Dubai, putting up with an hour and a half of traffic, one way. Now as Dubai dusts the effects of the bust off, the money has moved to Abu Dhabi, and so have the goras.
However, Abu Dhabi is now even costlier to live in than Dubai was. So the goras, and whoever else cares to, travel an hour and a half, one way, to work there.
Sum result: Abu Dhabi has made Dubai another Sharjah. Fancy that!

This land is (not) your land

The Arabs from the Middle East have come to feel very threatened by the presence of the Indians in the Gulf. By Arabs, I mean Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Egyptians, Lebanese, and to some extent the Turks. You see, they have much more in common with Arabs in the Gulf, religion and language, and hence, see Indians as outsiders. Especially the great swarm from the Malabar coast.
Why should fellow Arabs and Muslims share the oil wealth with Indians?
This was the feeling when the times were good. It’s only going to get more acute now in the recession.

Get more out

Life is a writer’s lifeblood. Experience is the very fountain that inks the parchment of prose or poetry. So basically, the idea is to get as much life and experience as possible, so that when you write, you have slightly more perspective than the drunk guy at the next table. This is precisely what life in the Gulf does not allow you. It straightjackets you into a certain fixed lifestyle all depending on your income. So, I find myself increasingly only writing about – Sports, Music, Movies, Books and Myself. I’ve got to get out more, or get more out.

Hot, hot, hot

A measure of global warming I first felt in Pune, maybe five years ago. The summers became unbearably hot. The Pune summer was hot, but never touching 40 Deg C. This year it regularly crossed 40 Deg C. That puts it in the range of the Gulf countries. And that’s global warming for you. Pune as hot as the Gulf. When it’s the monsoon in Pune it’s the summer in the Gulf. The heat here is like being slapped with a coal iron, trussed in a blanket, baked in an oven and thrown in a sauna. All at once.

Beach bizarre

It’s prohibitively hot right now in the Gulf. But, that does not stop those who have chosen not to flee the summer from going to the beach. This weekend, I packed all those who bore my last name and some friends and trooped to a sea-side resort. So, essentially you sleep all day and then go down to the beach by say 10.30 pm, when a strong sea breeze kills the humidity. Then till 2 am you do what people do on a beach during the day everywhere else in the world. Bizarre? Yes. Sensible? Very much so.

Barbers

Barbers from the Middle East – Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Jordan – all have spruced up salons and are reminiscent of the mid-1990s in India, when the urban male found the need for a salon atmosphere to get a haircut. The Filipinos come closest to turning the entire process of male grooming into an art. In fact they have flair, style and speed in the way they go about things. The Indians, largely from the south are terribly functional. Which is why I find the Pakistanis the best. Their attention to detail and pampering of customers combines all of the above.