Vide Rationale

We’ve lived in India our whole lives. Though you see other parts of the world on screens, it never registers as a tangibly real place. You can’t quite feel them. Our last international trip (to Switzerland) was a year ago and the memories had started fading. Only some shallow impressions remain.

Being in Dubai reminded us of Switzerland, of what it was like living out there in the better world. A lot of the same forgotten thoughts showed up again.

Of course, the two places aren’t that similar. Swiss beauty comes mostly from what’s naturally endowed to them: the alps, the landscapes, and the lakes. Whereas Dubai is fully artificially constructed. Yet it touches the same note of visual excellence – just of a different kind. The similarity between the two experiences was only in the degree of contrast with our life in an urban Indian city.

It reminded us of a certain quality of life which these people were living that was missing back home.

It wasn’t that Dubai was unrecognisably different from Bangalore. They were both big cities, and you’d get most of the same kinds of things. It’s just that everything was turned up a notch. The buildings, roads, cars, restaurants, cafes, malls, and hotels all felt premium. They were all sourced from a much larger stack of cash and it showed.

For now we’re staying in Downtown Dubai. It is the most opulent cityscape I’ve ever seen; so many skyscrapers that are dwarfed by the towering Burj Khalifa. Right beside it you have the Dubai Mall, which is a so incredibly large that they have an app to navigate you to different stores. Close by, there are other titans like the Dubai Frame, a 150 meters tall frame-like upright structure. Then there’s Museum of the Future, which, more than a building, is in my opinion a brilliantly designed piece of art. It’s as though these Emiratis don’t compromise on either scale or beauty.

We haven’t gone to too many places yet. But so far as I’ve seen, I can say the city is fantastic. Solidly built, elegant, multi-cultural, and posh. It’s hard to imagine that not so long ago this was just a barren desert. Truly a feat of human ambition and ingenuity.