Dubai

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

I had just started writing this blog and cut-pasted these four lines in the Word. (From Jabbarwocky, Lewis Carroll’s famous poem. Read the poem in the original, and you would be as confused as we were.

http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html )

Avi, who was sitting beside me and doing something on his laptop, looked over my shoulder.

“What on earth does this mean?” He asked, totally perplexed.

I was exasperated in trying to find ANY information about buses to various destinations in Dubai on the Net and had remembered my exasperation in trying to understand the poem ‘Jabbarwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, so I had cut-pasted those lines into the Word.

I thought I would give him a better explanation of this poem than Humpty Dumpty gave to Alice, so I started :

“Oh, the ‘slithy toves’ are sleek, air-conditioned buses of the Dubai public transport system that you see ‘gyring and gimbling’ that is, going here and there, in the wabe. ‘Wabe’ means roads. Borogoves are the tourists, who are ‘mimsy’, that is, totally flummoxed and ‘mome’ is away from home and absolutely ‘lost’. ‘Raths’ are just wroth tourists and they outgrabe means they tried to guess the workings of the Dubai Bus Transport system and failed and so justly ‘grumbled and griped’.

This still did not make any sense to him but he understood that I was mad at the Dubai Road Transport system.

“What is ‘brilling’?

Oh, ‘brilling’ means any creating confusing situation. ‘Brill’ means confusion.

He understood this perfectly, because he was as perplexed by the Dubai Public Transport system as I was.

There are many such ‘Brills’ of Dubai, about which you do not get any information on the Net. Mind you, we were NOT seeking confidential information but legitimate info. in the public domain.

The Dubai’s bus system is good, but you do not find the bus-routes or maps or timings or where it will stop, or ANYTHING useful on the Net.

So, you have to take a taxi everywhere.

Similarly, you do not find any info. about Dubai’s water-works. I was very curious about where does the water come from for Dubai’s populace, which does need and uses plenty of clean, clear water. Looking at swimming pools, bathtubs and fountains and gardens, it is difficult to believe that Dubai is situated in a desert.

‘Desalination’ is our guess, though I could not find any supportive or contrary evidence for it.

Avi had a student who worked in the Water-works Department and even he did not know much about it.

‘Anyway, why do you want to know the source of water? Just take your tub-bath and be happy. As a tourist, you need not know more’ was Avi’s advice.

I am the sort of person, who likes to count and measure and analyze everything, including the mango-trees before eating the mangoes. (Ped ginane se matlab in Hindi)

{Generally, by the time I count the trees, the mangoes have been eaten by other people.}

However, in this kind of situation, I found the advice worth following and so did not bother more about the Transport or the Water.

But those ‘Brill’ of Dubai would always remain a mystery to me.

The ‘Grills’ of Dubai are just that. They grill all the meats without any ‘masala’ and so it tastes bland to the Indian palate. The chillies, green or red, are conspicuous by their absence and you miss them, though all they do is to bring tears to your eyes.

I would advice all Indian tourists to take ‘red, hot chilly powder’ with them in the checked-in baggage (NOT in cabin-baggage) when they go to Dubai. Of course they need not do that if they are going to stay in ‘little India’, which has plenty of Indian restaurants.