Thank goodness we have Indians working in the newsroom of The National, because a major Bollywood star died in the UAE this weekend, and the newspaper’s Western and Arab staffers were unlikely to have known him. It shows up again what I have pondered a few times previously — the cultural divide between India and […]

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An advantage to living in a small country? When celebrities visit you tend to get much closer to them than you would in a bigger, more impersonal place. Like, say, a tennis tournament. Going to Wimbledon or the U.S. Open might be fun, but your interaction with players will be minimal. Same as any other […]

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This is interesting and a little strange. The Major League Soccer club FC Dallas has announced its intent to travel to the UAE in late January and stay in Abu Dhabi for nearly two weeks as the team begins preparations for the 2014 MLS season. Apparently, FC Dallas in recent years has gone to Cancun, […]

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This is always a bit tricky. Putting out newspapers on December 24 and December 25. Even in the Middle East, where Christmas this year was “Wednesday” … not much goes on. End of the year, a batch of sports taking a few months off … that happens even in Arabia. December 24 is the slowest […]

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999 magazine is published in English by a UAE government ministry, and the December issue had an interesting bit of information that makes for a handy list, too. (This was picked up by nearly every media outlet in the UAE, including The National. With comment from local law officials who make the point that ignorance […]

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Is this what it is like to live in New York? In a tower, scant feet from other people … and no one talks to anybody? An almost aggressive “keep away from me” vibe? We know people in this building … but we know them from the newspaper. By coincidence, or more probably word of […]

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Perhaps this represents some sort of breakthrough. Maybe I have now seen enough soccer that I know a bad game when I see one. Nah. Ten years ago I would have known this was a bad game. Twenty. Al Jazira 4, Al Wahda 3, in the Capital Derby, and an abominable performance by two Abu […]

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The UAE has soccer “derbies”, in the English sense — rivalries between neighbors. Al Wahda and Al Jazira, for instance, located only a couple of miles apart, here in Abu Dhabi. Sharjah’s two teams, Al Shaab and Sharjah, have a strong rivalry, too. But the country does not really have rivalries involving teams from different […]

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I have been thinking about this for some time now. A sort of nightmare soccer scenario. The UAE national team over the past year has played as well as it has at any time in the country’s history. Which may count for nothing on the World Cup stage — a potentially crushing disappointment I wrote […]

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Sticks and stones? It clearly is possible to hurt someone with words in the UAE, as a Canadian expat could tell you — as soon as he gets out of jail. Insults are taken very seriously in the UAE, as the case of the soccer coach Walter Zenga and a local reporter demonstrated. Zenga called […]

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