Back to Work

7 January copy... After a 3-weeks-plus holiday I'm back to work tomorrow. Holiday is British for leave from work. I feel I should clarify that because the way I see it holiday stands for special occasions, like actual holy days.

For me, my time off was not about any holy days or other special occasions, although the end of year had more than its share of these. First there was the American Thanksgiving Day, the UAE's National Day, then Christmas Day, New Year's Day and the last one today, the Orthodox Christmas Day.


National Day celebrations at the World Parachuting Championships
I'm not religious or very family oriented so all the holiday activity meant little to me. That said I enjoyed an American Thanksgiving dinner with a cousin of mine who happened to be visiting Dubai. I was more enthusiastic about UAE National Day, getting colored stickers for my car and taking in a couple of events.


a National Day reveller's car (not mine) at JBR
On Christmas Day I roasted a turkey and shared a simple dinner with my favorite red wine, with Venkatesh. On New Year's Day I camped out in my car with Venkatesh while watching fireworks at the Atlantis Palm.


Fireworks at the World Parachuting Championships on 2 December
But I spent most of my time off relaxing at home in the Marina or in Al Hamra, in addition to doing some cycling and kayaking. I shiny, brand new iMac also kept me happily occupied.

I had thought I would do a few other things, like look for a new job. I am not really motivated to go on the job hunt but having been in my current position for the past five years, it would be nice to try something new. On the other hand, that sort of change always holds a bit of peril.


There's no place like home to relax.
So, it's back to work tomorrow. Work is the sort of thing you do because you must. It pays the bills. But it also gives purpose to the day. The irony is that the early morning rise leads you to think, "I wish I didn't have to get up so early". But more often than not you later feel glad that work got you up early to start your day.

Postscript:

Tomorrow has come and the first day at work is a split shift with all going comfortably stress-free. I had a morning class of 2.5 hours and have an evening class of the same duration.

Al Hamra Village

Al Hamra Village in Ras Al Khaimah got its start around 2005, set around a natural lagoon. It began with a 9-hole golf course, a resort hotel, apartment blocks, townhouses and villas, all built in classic Arabic style.

It was later enlarged with an expanded golf course, a marina, a shopping mall, more apartment blocks plus high-rise towers, hundreds of additional townhouses and villas and a palace hotel.


salt-water creek running through the golf course

golf course surrounded by duplex villas
Let me lay that out again:

• an 18 hole golf course
• one resort hotel and one palace hotel with residences
• a large shopping mall
• a lagoon-front marina
• 16 apartment blocks
• 5 high-rise apartment towers
• hundreds of townhouses and villas

red-brick walking path between villas and golf course

flowering desert-scape garden
One might think Al Hamra Village had everything, and it does, except people. You know, the housing bubble, the crises... Actually, I'm joking, at least half-joking. There are people in the village. The residential units number probably between two and three thousand. My guess is that half have been purchased.

But there are a lot of weekend-only residents, like me, and probably a fair number of overseas holiday residents.


high-rise apartment towers overlooking the golf course greens

newer villas and apartment towers in European style

Arabesque villas and townhouses of the first phases
Nevertheless, life in the village is definitely on the quiet side. But for those who like things more lively there are several eating and drinking outlets at the hotels and the golf and marina clubs--and the mall. One of the three liquor outlets stays open 7 days a week, 9 a.m. to midnight.

Some people in the apartments have dinner parties and do barbecues on their big balconies (they're not supposed to)! But the community generally stays quiet.


beach at lagoon, fronting villas

the five Royal Breeze towers

the eight Marina apartment blocks, mine circled
The mall has got everything, except a cinema--reportedly on the way. But the expansive mall is the only retail outlet apart from the liquor and hotel shops. For Marina, Royal Breeze and many of the villa residents a needed carton of milk is a drive away.

So, you've got to plan your shopping carefully. Even though the mall's got it all, if you want to save money the old-fashioned village of Al Jazeera is just a stone's throw away. Everything there is cheap--laundry, car wash, quick eats, groceries, etc.


golfing greens, blue lagoon and sand-colored residences

the salt-water lagoon, great for water recreation

the Palace hotel entrance
But for those who like quiet outdoor recreation, Al Hamra Village is a mecca. I love to start with an early morning kayak session through the lagoon and connecting creeks, followed by a long walk and then a swim at the seaside beach. After that a more relaxing swim in the big communal pool behind my unit is the perfect way to cap the morning's activity.


green lawns and gardens decorate the open grounds between villas

stepping stones crisscross the lawns
Green landscaping with date palms, grasses, small trees, bushes and lots of flowers are everywhere. Stepping stone type pathways are laid out here and there between villas.

In the evening nothing beats a stroll or a cycle trip through the entire village. Wide red-brick pathways good for walking or cycling run for long stretches between the villas and golf course and along the lagoon. The quiet, meandering roadways running throught the village are also good for cycling.


my cycle near the end of a relaxing ride
Al Hamra Village is 100 km from Dubai along the North East coast of the UAE.

Religion

One may think I have a bit of an obsession with religion, even while claiming to be an atheist. I think part of my interest is connected with the realization, and I can't recall when it was... but the realization that there is no God, no eye in the sky and no afterlife to worry about. It is incredibly liberating to come to the realization that all the religion we grow up and are surrounded with is basically false.


So, it is sometimes interesting to compare my former self in a variety of religious manifestations to my present self. I remember in youth always wanting to be a "good boy" in the Roman Catholic mold. I never swore, would never smoke and was very conservative on sexual matters. All of this remains with me to this day. As a young adult I became a seminarian, in preparation of becoming a priest. And some years after that I became a born again Christian.

Interestingly, being a born again Christian seemed to me to be such a logical proposition. It seemed to be based on reason, not blind or irrational faith. But what I later came to understand is that that reasoning was flawed. I had mistakenly attributed certain life experiences at the time to religious phenomena. For example, I would eventually come to realize that the presence of Jesus in whatever spiritual or emotional sense I experienced it was, in fact, illusory. That sense of presence was attributable to natural as opposed to supernatural causes.

Certainly, there is a positive element to religiosity, mainly in the form of social charity. This is not likely to be replaced in an atheist lifestyle. But this is not the fault of atheism, rather the result of the general oppression of atheistic expression.

Religiosity for some, and I would say quite often in the case of Christian evangelists, is very much immersed in intellectual dialog, contrary to common perceptions from the outside. Christian fundamentalists are not non-thinking robots. The problem, however, is that they are tragically misguided. Once they buy into the notion that there is an infallible source of knowledge, i.e. the bible, they then get lost in a cycle of circular and false reasoning.


Their intellectual activity is focussed exclusively on determining how to square what the sacred text says with the real world around them. They are also exhorted to figure out how they can then conform un-wavingly to their understanding of the text. Under such circumstances one has a tendency to spend much of one's waking day pondering the words of St. Paul and how to live those words. That is an intellectual exercise indeed, but the result is that one foregoes pondering all the other great sources of knowledge and reasoning in the world.

Of course, and even more tragically, there are a large number of religious who don't endeavour to exercise their intellect at all, but simply follow what they are told. The majority of religious simply pretend to be religious, for being too lazy to give any thought to how the world really works and are too cowardly to do anything different from those around them.

Intersting, isn't it... the way religion or its absence affects people's behaviour.

Religious Hypocrisy

I am sure some of you have heard of Islamic banking. I suppose there are some onerous aspects of banking which run counter to Islamic principles, thus the need for an Islamic version.

But is Islamic banking not just a matter of playing around with language while engaging in the same practices as secular banking? It is like, as is common in many corners of the religious universe, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the presumed Almighty.


The Lakes and the Springs villa communities
Case in point, Islamic mortgages:

Say you go into the office of the mortgage financier who is following Islamic principles. The home you want to purchase sells for 100,000 dollars. Since Islamic principles forbid charging interest, you are told your mortgage will work as follows:

Bank pays, say, 100,000 dollars as purchase price for the home to the seller. You then pay the same amount plus a 10% annual levy to the bank over the next 10 years. You get your home and the bank gets back its principle amount plus the 10% annual payment. Because this is an Islamic product the money collected by the bank above the principle is not interest. How then, you ask. Well, the home you have obtained through the mortgage product is in fact the property of the bank, who had purchased it on your behalf. The principle and additional 10% you pay to the bank (in monthly instalments for convenience sake, of course) is rent to your landlord, the bank. Not interest, no... RENT. So the great Almighty who lives somewhere up in the sky is now satisfied that His pronouncement against interest has been honored.

Thank God for such a wise and perceptive Almighty!

Oh, and as for the intent of the Islamic principle that forbids interest... The intent, I suppose, is to avoid inflicting onerous hardships on the borrower. The wonderfully clever Islamic banking product takes care of this angle as well. In a traditional mortgage, when one fails to meet his regular payments--perhaps due to a job loss, illness or other hardship--the bank may initiate a process to take possession of the property. The key words here are initiate a process. In the Islamic version of the mortgage, the bank owns the property from the outset. So there is no need to bother with initiating any processes.


Miss a payment and you, the buyer, will have defaulted. In the birthplace of Islamic banking, the UAE, this means the bank is within its right to call the police, surrender to them your mis-payment deed (one of the 10 years of monthly signed checks you were required to surrender to the bank when accepting the mortgage) and off to jail you go. You're in jail, the bank has the property which was its own all along and all parties are happy, not least the Almighty for whose rules the bank has so faithfully preserved.

That's Islamic banking. That's religious hypocrisy!

P.S. Out of fairness to the government of the UAE, it has just been announced in news reports that the government will no longer allow security checks to be used to initiate arrest procedures on those who have missed a payment. Unfortunately, this will have happened a bit too late for the numbers of homebuyers who have already landed in jail --whether taking on standard banking projects or the more enlightened Islamic ones.