Collapsing worlds..

I spend the whole of Christmas day (ie today) in the Dubai International Airport waiting for a connecting flight to Cochin. Thanks to some amazing traffic because of the holiday season the earliest I could manage a ticket was with a halt of over 15 hours in this huge terminal/shopping mall/ Non-place. However, the sheer magnitude of people in here and free Wi-Fi kept me going.

Here are a few photos I made during the course of the day - of things that more and more we have gotten used to or rather that we don’t notice for some reason or the other. Photos which illustrate that how in cities like Dubai different world are colliding or probably co-existing – whether this is good or bad I guess only time will tell.

I’ll start with this image of how the 'double meaning' sleaze of corporate world is superimposed over an airline gate dedicated for Haj travellers from all over the world. (And to remember that Dubai is still an important part of the ‘Islamic’ Arab world - this might have seemed absurd to anyone from Dubai 10 years ago).

While the people who can afford to buy there ‘Channels, YSLs, Pradas and Mont Blancs’ downstairs in Porsche Duty free mall; Immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent and South-East Asia wait in huge queues for their flights back home.

And the last image in this series - Here a few Pakistani Immigrants are waiting for their flights while in the background - the walls of the airport are slowly but surely being taken over by - advertisements of highly exclusive city developments that have nothing to offer to them and to a large majority of people that keep cities like this going.

This of course is a larger problem, a global problem, a problem to which no-one seems to have a viable alternative to. But my question is – Shouldn’t we be very worried about what these colliding worlds could create, could generate or rather could degenerate?

(This entry has been posted from the Dubai International Airport itself - using the free Wi-Fi)