Over the past ten days I have been experiencing the future. I say this in the sense that I left my world that seems mired in the murkiness of its own past and seems to be tearing itself apart in frustrated impotent rage; and have leapt into a world that two decades ago did not exist in any meaningful sense… as did my own country, recently liberated from its former ghastliness … and was poised for a great leap forward.
 

A man I know told me many years ago that he had moved his business to a South East Asian backwater that was ‘taking off’ as he put it, and the pace of change was both exhilarating and simultaneously terrifying. He compared his new venue to our home town and described them as being on two intersecting curves… one up and the other down.
 
I have now had a moment to experience what he meant. A week in Dubai has given me an insight into the history of my own home city of Johannesburg coupled to an insight into the post-industrial revolution that has overtaken much of the [so-called] developed world.
 
My own home city is a place that went from empty bush to city status in a mere two decades and then shifted slowly over time to an industrialized venue morphing in its post-centenary phase into a seemingly stultified parochial financial hub. It has become a model of what happens to inspiration when the politics of envy and greed coupled to myopic vested interest are overwhelmed by the relentless revolutionary trend to a frenzied knowledge-based economy… that few, seemingly, anticipated. The respected leader of a small opposition party in the country referred a year ago to us being on a “slippery slope”, and repeated his observation more recently with a sad sense of urgency.
 
Dubai symbolises the alternate choice taken at the flood. It is truly the world’s first post-industrialised, information based metropolis: a 21st century city. And it is a place of wonder. In particular its shops and restaurants demonstrate service in a way i have rarely experienced and its two great Malls… that of the Emirates and the humungous Dubai Mall with its Aquarium, its Ice rink and its exquisitely elegant store layouts, not to mention the world’s biggest book store proving that reading is not dead in other places: are experiences that renew belief in shopping.
 
Then of course for an avowed foodie such as i am what a cornucopic range of food experiences in which to enjoy fine dining. Like [for instance] the entirely unique ‘Tom & Serge’; a diner in an unlikely, warehouse quarter of the city, packed to the gunnels with other consumate foodies on a weekend morning; demonstrating their appeal with service as slick as the proverbial whistle: snacking on Turkish poached eggs and guzzlings of delicately prepared salmon. While at the Mall of the Emirates, in the basement of the splendiferous hotel Sheraton, there was a beer soaking evening at the ‘Brunswick Sports Club’; washed down with Japanese style Wagyu Shroomburgers, none of which will be available when you arrive: because they said at both venues that they change the menu every few weeks to maintain a foodie delight experience… What cool places.
 
And then there are others to numerous to mention serving perfectly delivered Guiness and scatterlings of cod and bass and…and… yum yum yum. I must take a break now to guzzle a length of Australian grain fed beef; served Bleu, without the usual painful clarification, when i want it back home, anywhere other than at Wombles. Prost.
 

Presumably Dubai had certain advantages over other developing places. It is not a place littered with electioneering posters, and ancient threatened nostalgia. Neither is it a place where competing interests vie in the streets for the place in the sun, rather than a place in the sun. Democracy may be, as the late Mr. Churchill famously observed, the best form of bad government, but its drawbacks are that change is a messy affair and routinely, almost wantonly, retards development in places where competing interests function without collective vision.
 
Dubai on the other hand does not seem to be a democratic place, as we [in my home turf] understand that idea in its post-liberation form, i.e: in the political sense, although it also manages [to seem] to be a place that recognises competing rights to enjoy the best of modernity and a right to get rich, as long as it doesn’t disturb established rule.
 
To this extent vast palatial ruling class properties sit uneasily to the searching eye, with the furtive discarded corners, in which the world’s new urban poor, pour in search of sustenance. At the same time they, the new urban poor, are [apparently]upwardly mobile, escaping unbearably grinding homeland conditions: and are pouring remittances home to suffering countrypersons in a multitude of origin territories. So be it. And from the news stories printed [relatively, presumably] freely in the local media there is both an awareness of, and acceptance of, an emerging “Rights Culture”.
 
The overwhelming awareness though is of a triumphal surge to prosperity on a scale that would be unimaginable if it weren’t so overwhelmingly tangible. Two hundred metre wide multilane highways coalesce chaotically into terrifying monumental traffic surges, in which a plethora of strategically placed cameras register some 13,000 road traffic offences per day, as hundreds of thousands of expatriate knowledge workers pour out each day to concentrate their efforts; to produce the first, world’s, tertiary economy, founded almost entirely on services: for nothing much is made here beyond large scale purified water, and there is no oil to be dug from the ground in any meaningful quantities.
 
And the result? Desert vanquished. Parks, waterways, golf courses, cultivated gardens and tree-lined avenues, fed with water squeezed from the surrounding oceans, through desalination activity… the success of which is signified by a growing emergence of vitalized birdlife. The multilane highways, some as much as eight lanes running parallel to other eight lane highways, both going in the same direction at times, with further highways pouring in opposing direction, compete with modern metro rail services and sophisticated post-modern tram lines. The surging traffic flow combined with the strangeness of left hand driving is routinely heart stopping… and i am thankful that although i sit where i always sit, that i am not at the wheel. And to think it has all happened in the blink of an eye.
 
And all of this pouring past an architectural wet dream maze of dizzying, vertigo inducing, towering, monumental 50 plus story, building blocks of brilliantly lit, literal skyscraping edifices packed with a new largely expatriate workaholic middle class pumping sixty hour weeks, and partying in a multi thousand range of entertainment venues housing every manicured brand name known to modernity and trading in shops that seem never to close.
 
What a place of work, work, work. Demonstrating the immense accumulative power of Doing and Doing and Doing. No wonder i see very little grey power in evidence. it is not a country for old persons.
 
And I, who always thought of my own hometown as the “Place of Gold”, feel now that I am returning to a place of talk, talk, and more talk. A backward quarter of the world that became hooked on the rhetoric of performance without the accompanying action. I perceive in its most intrisic form the reality of “Opportunity Cost” This Dubai is not a place that chose vacillation, obfuscation, procrastination and lost time and therefore missed the development boat. Through some profound inscrutable folly we are, in our corner, by comparison regressing… on steroids.
 
Cheers