I have learnt to call this country home. Twenty five years in once place does that to you. I know the streets of Bur Dubai like the back of my hand. For a good part of my childhood, I used to play hide and seek around where Bur Juman sits right now. Sometimes my mother would walk me over to al Fahidi street. We’d go grocery shopping at the Choitram’s there, get ice cream from Baskin Robbins and then rent a couple of VHS tapes at al Mansoor Video. There used to be a Modern Bakery van parked right outside. I remember playing cricket on the grounds near Karama, near where Wafi now sits. I remember the desert looming large, right across Defense roundabout. Back then, al Ain’s Hili Fun City wasn’t a derelict scrapyard, and the World Trade Center was bewilderingly tall.

But when my father got off the boat, 35 years ago, none of those things existed. He landed at Abu Dhabi airport with nothing much else but fifteen Dirhams to his name, money he’d borrowed from a friend in Karachi, his hometown. He started out working in advertising, with one of the Galadari brothers, long before Khaleej Times or Galadari Publishing were even a dream. He then took up a sales position with an engineering interest the Galadaris owned, and engineering is what he’s been doing ever since. He had walked into a land of opportunities. “It was really a bed of roses, ready for the picking” he says.

Before he came to the UAE, my dad spent his early twenties in Tokyo, cooking meals in diners, labor camps, five star hotels. Pretty much any place that would hire him. He worked the kitchens of Honk Kong, Bangkok, Singapore and Kobe amongst others. His sentiments on the UAE’s 40th ‘National Day’: he regrets not having settled down in Tokyo. “Life would have been different.” he says. He’s voiced his regret many times before. And now I understand his reasons.

The UAE has never been home to him. Even though he’s made his life here, lived (very) comfortably, and enjoyed freedoms he would not have in his native Pakistan, he hesitates to call this country home. And I find it hard to disagree with him. Not for the fact that most of the roses have been picked and all that’s left is thorns, but because, at the end of it all, we’re just expatriates here.

An expatriate is one who leaves his home country to live elsewhere, by choice (as opposed to being exiled, perhaps). This puts me in a difficult position. I never made that choice. I was born in Dubai, and have lived here all my life.In my twenty five years here, I have hardly been out of the country for a cumulative four years, including vacations, business trips, visa runs, education abroad etc. I find it harder to identify with my ‘native’ Pakistan than I do with the UAE. I have absorbed the (multi) culture of this place just as much as any one else. And I have been attacked by certain very nationalistic ‘locals’ for saying so. But the truth is, the culture of the UAE is the very amalgamation of the scores of nationalities that are represented here.

What I haven’t and can’t lay claim to, is the heritage. I am not a UAE National. Neither am I a citizen. The law recognizes me as a temporary resident. Which makes it all the more hard for me to call it home. The realization that I might one day have to return to Pakistan makes me fearful, for a great many reasons I will not discuss here. I am now learning that this country is a house, not a home. If my dad had settled for Tokyo, I’d have been a Japanese citizen several times over now.

I do not wish to call myself Emirati. I understand that the Emirati identity needs to be a nationalistic one in order to survive in the face of the huge emigrant population. Nationalism in the interests of self preservation is understandable. But how is it possible to justify how it is the ‘expats’ that have built this place (a lot of them with their bare hands too) from the ground up are largely expendable? The fact that the ‘expat’ is an expendable ‘worker drone’ to the ‘locals’ is best illustrated by what happened at Jumeirah, post 2nd Dec: a large majority of people cleaning up the streets were resident aliens, with a lot of locals clicking photos on their cameras and phones.

The people who’ve spent entire lifetimes in this country leave with nothing but severance pay and an overpowering fear of how they will adjust to their new life ‘back home’. I know people who live in great fear of being axed, or going bankrupt, or just having to leave the country otherwise. These people feel like they belong here. They do belong here. How can they not?

These fears are probably faced by long haul expats anywhere in the world, regardless of where they are living and where they ‘belong’. But there is an added worry that comes with being an expat in the UAE: you can’t belong here. No matter if you were born here, or if you’ve lived here for 35 years, and built your entire life around the country. You have to prepare yourself to go ‘back’ one day. If you’re lucky you’ll get a chance to stay behind and look for another job to hold on to. Most people get four weeks. Some don’t even get that.

But what do I go ‘back’ to? More importantly, what am I ‘here’ for? Economic sensibilities (or lack thereof) aside, I still try to believe in this place. Lately I’ve begun to wonder if it’s worth doing so. All around me are people who come here for a quick buck and that’s it. The quick buck defines their life in the UAE. It reflects a great deal in their attitude towards the country. Most of them don’t feel the need to be responsible towards the well being or sustainability of a country they aren’t allowed to call home.

The crux of it is simply a question of why: why should I put in my blood, sweat and tears towards somebody else’s dream? Why should I invest so much into building a house that I’ll only be a temporary (paying) guest in? Yes, it was okay so long as the money was good, but what now?

Such questions are usually answered with “If you don’t like it, go home” around these parts. But I am home, and I do like it. I just don’t know how much longer I can count on calling it home, and whether it’s sensible to do so anymore. At a personal level, these sentiments (and the decisions they will influence) may or may not have significant impact on my career and my life in the UAE. But if you zoom out just a bit, these sentiments being present across a vast majority of the population of a country can not be healthy.

Citizenship might be too much to ask, but some recognition beyond ‘resident alien’ would be welcomed with open arms. The right to ‘return home’ to the UAE whenever required, or the right to maintain resident status without having to return to the country every six months would really put a lot of people’s doubts and fears at ease.

I don’t count on anything happening. I just hope something does. I’d love to actually be a part of National Day celebrations some day, with the reassurance that some small unfortunate mistake won’t lead to me being thrown out of my home for good. And barred from re-entering. Maybe December 2nd will be rightly called ‘Union Day’ by then. Until then, I might try to stick around anyway, but not sure I will. For now, I’m just trying to pick whatever roses I can find, to take away with me to plant somewhere with greener pastures.

Posted from Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

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Diet:

Breakfast is any two of:

• Whole grain cereal with 125ml full cream milk (hate the taste of skimmed).
• Cereal bar in the 100-150 calorie range (these are high in carbs/sugar).
• Fresh fruit (an apple or a banana.)
• One slice wholemeal (not brown) bread with: tuna, lettuce, onions, capers and a dash of mustard.
• Two half boiled eggs.
• One slice (15g) of full fat Gouda cheese.

Lunch is split into two meals, 180 minutes apart, and comprises of any two of :

• One cucumber and two carrots.
• Mixed nuts.
• A banana.
• Tuna salad from Subways. Lots of lettuce, no tomatoes/gherkins/jalapenos and about a teaspoon of 1,000 island dressing.
• Tuna sandwich from Subways. As above, but with a couple of jalapenos. And I ask them to remove the dough from the bread.
• One medium chicken breast, no fat, grilled, with steamed veggies. Ready to eat meal from the super market.
• Nature Valley granola bar (200 calories).

Dinner is either one of:

• Half a serving of whatever’s cooked at home, but only if it isn’t swimming in oil.
• Chicken or fish, small portion.
• Fresh fruit and milk.
• Green salad with beans and chickpeas and other protein stuff.

Cheat meal (should be once a week, but I have been overdoing these):

• Ultra fattening pasta. The one I like at Romano’s is a good 1800 calories.
• Salad at CPK. This is a cheat meal because the ‘healthiest’ salad at CPK is 1300 calories.
• Prawns and other seafood.
• Pizza. The baked kind, not Pizza Hut deep fried stuff.
• Grills.
• Steak. So rare it has to be tied down to prevent it from escaping.

I’m not following the above to the letter. I do deviate every now and then, but try to make up for it at the gym. I follow my exercise plan religiously though. Exercise is 5 days a week, with Friday and Saturday off. If I get tired or feel like I need rest, I throw in another rest day in the middle of the week, but compensate on Saturday.

Cardio:

• 45 minutes on the treadmill. 5kph at 5% incline. Machine tells me I burn ~450 calories.
• 12-15 minutes of HIIT on the stationary bike (this is just once a week for now). 3 minutes of warm up (I skip this if I’ve been on the treadmill just before), followed by intervals (10 second full effort, 20 second slack) and then cool down. I can get my heartbeat up to 180 bpm on a good day.
• Calisthenics: Push-ups (trying 50 a day), leg lifts, crunches and other stuff I mix around.

Getting a heart rate monitor soon, possibly followed by a bike.

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My resting heart rate has come down from ~95 to ~85 beats per minute. My max heart rate has gone up from 140 to 180 bpm. I can actually walk for an hour or two without getting tired. I’m not lethargic anymore. I feel motivated and stimulated. I sleep better. My indigestion problems have nearly sorted themselves out.

Quite a few people have been asking me how I did it, and what I’m doing and what diet I follow and everything. I don’t do Atkins, or Cyclic Ketogenic, or Apple Soup Diet or whatever. Those things are just ridiculously stupid. I’ve tried them before, and all you can accomplish with them (and countless other variations) is losing a few kilos in a short period of time, and then crash, followed by rapid weight gain (I’ve personally experienced this). Fad diets aren’t sustainable. They might be okay to start with, but certainly aren’t feasible long term.

What I did is not really the point. It’s almost irrelevant. What’s important is why I did it. There isn’t as much focus on the Whys as there is on the Hows and Whats. Lots of people want to lose weight because they want to look better, or fit into a wedding dress, or maybe their Adele impersonation gig didn’t turn out really well. Here’s a brief outline of what worked for me:

Know your goal. Our bodies aren’t genetically wired to be more cosmetically appealing. There is no biological or biochemical process that makes you ‘look good’. Looking good is all in the head; being fitter is generally accepted as looking good because historically, fitter people have survived better. That’s what’s developed our perspective of what is ‘good looking’ until recently. Our perspective is now distorted by images directly injected into our brains. At the very least, physical fitness is what the goal should be. But fitness isn’t an end. It’s a means to an end. Having quantified, measurable short term goals along with a major long term goal helps. I set weekly and monthly targets for myself, in terms of weight, body fat, muscle strength and stamina. My long term goal is making it to Snow Lake one day. Or at least being able to trek cross country.

Educate yourself. Don’t follow a diet plan or an exercise routine just because it appeals to you, and appears to be effective and works for other people. It might not work for you. Get into the biology and biochemistry behind your diet and exercise. It helps a lot to learn about metabolism. You might also want to read up on heart health and basic cardiology. Also, It is more important to know why not to eat certain foods, than to just simply know what foods to avoid. As long as your research is right, and you make up your own diet based on what you know is good for you, you are more likely to stick by your diet than if you were to just draw up a diet out of thin air. Start with Wikipedia and graduate to other sources as you need them.

Count calories and eat right. Look at those nutrition labels on products, they mean stuff. As a general rule, the harder it is to find the nutrition data, the worse the product. Ingredients are important too. Avoid hydrogenated oils at all costs. Trans fat is a no-no. Whole grains are better than processed grains, and so on. This excellent website has very detailed nutrition data on thousands of foods. Calculate your base metabolic rate and eat accordingly. Try to be consistent with your macro-nutrient ratio. I try to keep mine around 25-50-25. That’s carbs-protien-fat. Also, try to have smaller meals more often.

Track your progress. This is very important. Use a notepad, or an app on your smartphone, or whatever. If you’re running blind you’re bound to hit a wall sooner or later. Things you need to keep track of: weight and body fat % should be measured twice a week, and calorie intake, calories burned and how much you exercised should be recorded daily. A food diary helps as well. Photo logs provide lots of encouragement too.

Exercise right. Burn fat and not muscle. Don’t jump into an hour of intense cardio right after weeks of inactivity. There are different types and methods of cardio, learn them. Start slow. If you want to lift weights, understand your skeleto-muscular system, and what goes where. Don’t lift more weights than you can or should. Don’t throw weights. Calisthenics is a wonderful weightlifting substitute for beginners, and is my poison of choice. Never ignore unusual pain or discomfort. You might not have to see a doctor, but you should try to find out what happened. If exercising gives you pain in your chest, you are in deeper shit than you realize. If you ignore this, you will head for the ER pretty soon.

Sleep right. Try to wake up just after the sun comes up. Get at least 6 hours of sleep a night. The number of hours you sleep at a stretch should ideally be a multiple of 1.5 (the length of a sleep cycle). Try to get in 7.5 hours of sleep a night. sleepyti.me is a handy calculator that tells you when to sleep depending on when you want to wake up, or when you should wake up if you go to sleep now.

Tell everyone. Seriously. Write it down and blog it. The more people you tell what you are doing, the more likely you are to be consistent at it. This is the single most important ‘secret’ to becoming fitter and healthier. Keep reminding everyone about what you’re doing, how much you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished etc. This is better than reminding yourself.

Last but not least, don’t forget to cheat once in a while.

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But you’re not that far. Just an incredibly long series of left and right turns away.

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Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions is one of my favorite books. These come highly recommended. And I’ve also been reading some of Vonnegut’s short stories. Another Vonnegut book I have liked up is Timequake.

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

I’m halfway through this. Huxley’s first book. A lovely period piece. Pokes fun at the affluent artsy private types of the twenties. Delightful read.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

This is a mindtrip. Beyond any other Mindtrip. The writing style is indescribable, and very hard to get into. I picked it up because I heard that it’s great science fiction and notorious for being one of the hardest to read books ever written, perhaps second only to Pride and Prejudice. I’m four pages in, and find it challenging.

Allan Quatermain by Henry R Haggard

I’m doing it wrong by reading the last book in the series first. But this is the only book I could find.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murkami

One of my favorite authors. Also gonna read Kafka on the Shore.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco

This promises to be a trip. A book dealer loses his memory but remembers every word of everything he’s ever read, and relives his life through newspapers, comic strips, novels, his grandfather’s journal and others.

Lila by Robert Pirszig

Sequel to one of the most important books ever written.

Non-Fiction

Screw It Let’s Do It by Richard Branson

In this book Branson tells us how he screwed it and then did it. And how he’s going to do it. A must read if you want to know how one of the most influential business icons in the world made it big and what he intends to from here.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B Cialdini

This is a book for evil marketing people. Or those who want to learn about how evil marketing people work. Take a wonderful peek into how human psychology is manipulated into buying. For marketing people, this is a great book that gives you a better understanding of how you can persuade people into buying, and how you can convert more potential leads into sales. There are a lot of references to real live cases and studies where there has been a measurable improvement in sales or conversions by adopting the methodologies discussed. There is a good deal of analysis as well, but not textbook level depth. This is a casual reader at best, but a great starting point. This is a really slow read for me because I keep going back to re-read certain parts in order to see them in a new light.

The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is a hero to me. I have been reading his essays and following him for quite some time now. I might be a little biased in my opinion (what is an objective opinion anyway?), but Kurzweil, a futurologist and a transhumanist, is the single most important visionary and genius of our times. In this book, he provides us with an insight into where he thinks mankind his headed. His predictions of the future are both terrifying and awe inspiring. Explore how the pace of innovation and evolution for a given system are exponentially increasing as the amount of order increases. And try to grasp what this means for us, and how we are learning to manipulate our very nature as we were once learning to manipulate our environments.

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

I’m a pseudo astrophysics wannabe who doesn’t even have a telescope, and I love reading about superstrings and GUT and pea brains.

The Meme Machine by Susan J Blackmore

I’m an anthropology geek in the making. This book was recommended to me by Amazon after I read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which was a very very good book, and one I believe should be compulsory reading at the high school level.

Guns, Germs an Steel by Jare M Diamond

This was recommended by a friend ages ago, but I haven’t gotten round to reading it. It promises to be a very interesting book, especially for anthropology and history geeks.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault

Something I’ve been wanting to read for a great deal of time just so I can boast that I’ve read it. I’ve read a couple of essays by Foucault on morality and a friend suggested I read this.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Because I can’t get things done. I was planning this blog post for a month now.

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Because the government said so.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

This is because I want to describe my self as “Machiavellian” and put that on my business card. But I’d like to earn the right to do so first.

Trade to Win by Thomas L Busby

My broker gave me this.

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Hilda wasn’t a clever person though. She could hardly dial a phone number without ending up in bed with cold feet and a runny nose. Not that she had any use for a phone any way. She was very very deaf, and very very alone (she still persisted with the telephone though). She lived all by herself in a little house on top of a hill, many many miles away from the nearest mailbox. The only visitors she ever had were the storks, who stopped to ask for directions to the homes of people who didn’t really want children anyway. Hilda couldn’t hear a word of what they said, so those people never got their children anyway.

One cold rainy February morning, as Hilda was preparing to wake up, something unexpected happened. There was a knock on the door. And then another knock. And then many more knocks. Followed by the window breaking, door being unlatched, two people hurrying inside and lighting a fire. But Hilda could hear nothing of this ruckus.

It had stopped raining by the time Hilda made her way downstairs to the biggest shock of her life. She nearly dropped her nose. Sitting on her favorite sitting-thing, right by her favorite window, were a man and a woman, arm in arm, with round white bits in their ears. Hilda had never seen anything quite like it.

They started to get up and introduce themselves. All Hilda heard was “Gew oyain isoya outade inne uwas illay olla sai”. And then she snatched the round white bits in their ears and put them in hers, and all she could hear was ticklish things. And then Hilda had an idea. She ran to her twiddle bits and her glowy things and her wires and devised a plan.

She locked the nice couple in the basement, with a book called “Down with the PetroDollar”, some nibbly bits, water and a bib. And then she hired a cat, and they began to work on her plan. They put together the twiddly bits and the glowy things and the wires with a cupful of broken television and some apple juice. They then put all of this into the oven, and set it to Not Too Hot. Hilda turned the timer on the oven halfway around, and then waited for the cat to jump in fright.

The soundlovemagicspacelive contraption was ready. Hilda took it, and the nice couple in her basement, and locked them in a box, marked it “For Space, from Hilda”, and sent it off with the cat.

Four thousand, seven hundred and eleven storks later, the box returned with only the soundlovemagicspacelive contraption in it. The contraption had listened to the love of the people in the vast quietness of space where sound is not allowed to go. It had listened, and it had arranged itself in neat little electromagnetic patterns. This is what they sounded like:

The air around your ears has never danced as beautifully as this before.

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Dear QE2,

Tourists are the money. Especially for someplace like the UK, which as we all know, is a small island country inhabited by colored people trying to make a living by robbing glorious white people of their livelihoods and their birthright to social welfare.

Which is why I don’t understand why the UK Border Agency refused me entry clearance over a slight error in judgement from their part. My refusal letter gives me two reasons. In short, the two pages of gibberish and legalese can be cut short to the following:

“We don’t think that all this money which you have had in your bank account for two years is yours, and 30,000 GBP is certainly not enough to support a ten day visit to the UK. We also note that your employer is transferring more money to your account than the salary stated in your contract, which shows that you are a fraud. Also, the fact that you have two businesses registered to your name and family in your country of residence tells us that you might not return from the UK because these things hardly hold anyone back. You have also given us a hotel booking, but we believe that this is not enough proof that you have accommodation in the UK. You also stated that you want to come to the UK for sightseeing and tourism but haven’t provided us with a full detail of where you will be every minute of your trip. You can try to apply for a visa again, the cashier is in the room to your right, Thank you.”

What the tea? Who loans anyone 30,000 GBP (~ US$ 48,800) to hold for two years? How can the money not be mine? It’s in a bank account under my name! I also showed proof that I have money in other savings instruments. A regular fixed income. How can I not afford to go to the UK for ten days with that kind of money? London must be a very very expensive city indeed.

And my employer is giving me more money than my stated salary. Why? Because I get commissions and expense reimbursements, that’s why. If the entry clearance officer processing my application at the time lacked the common sense required to understand something that simple, he or she is severely underqualified for the job and should be peeling potatoes for a living instead.

And I might not return from the UK? Oh jolly scones and muffins! YES! I will abandon my comfortable life with a good steady income from a profitable business in a tax free zone and move to the UK in search of work at a fish n chips shop in some dirty back alley of London filled with drunk retards pissing on the curb and junkies licking ice off the street and crying themselves to sleep in a pool of piss and rain. Not to mention living in fear of the police and tax authorities all the time. You must be out of your senses to make these presumptions. I’m sure you get a lot of people abandoning their well set lives and moving to the UK in order to make less than minimum wage at some dirty joint and then applying for asylum once they get caught, stealing your public funds. Because we all know that the UK is some sort of utopia with fascinating opportunities and justice for all.

And how is a fully paid hotel booking not enough proof of  accommodation? Do you expect me to buy a house in Sussex or wherever it is that tourists buy houses when they want to come to London for a week? And your field on the online application was like 20 characters. The best I could squeeze into that was “Tourism and sightseeing”. Do you want me to put on a satellite tracking anklet? You are the Police State/CCTV Nation. You do all the tracking.

But screw all that. Let me just get this straight. Your forefathers just dropped anchor in my part of the world one fine day 275 odd years ago, and decided that it was a wonderfully nice place. Then you took over it and ruled it for nearly 200 years, in the name of tea and opium. Your illegal and inhuman empire generated vast amounts of wealth at the expense of our culture and race.

And now, when I just want to visit your sorry bog of an island just to see a few museums and parks and whatnot, you have the nerve to deny me ‘entry clearance’ just because some corkface working at one of your offices decides that I’m some kind of risk. His argument and reasoning is clearly misguided. I don’t think I want much to do with the UK anymore.

Because, at the end, it is all just ‘unofficial’ racial profiling. It’s nationalistic fascism.

I have a right mind to go somewhere like Laos or Greece or someplace else that really needs my money, and could put it to better use than funding ridiculously expensive royal weddings. And I will take all my receipts from my trip and fax them along with your refusal letter back to your sorry Embassy. You can then claim an equivalent amount from the Entry Clearance Spastic that decided your country was unworthy of my vacation credits.

Thanking you and sincerely yours,

A Paki.

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