Okay so I am here in Doha now, staying at Saravana Bhavan,
yes you read it right, and sharing the room with Mr. Nallathambi. To those of
you to whom it sounds weird, well it isn’t.
As a friend of mine informed me, the arab population here is
some 30%, rest includes Indians, Philippines, Jordanians, Palestinians and the Europeans.
The way I could differentiate them was, Indians, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Philippines,
Qataris, people who are not from Qatar but speak arabi, and the Europeans. In short
when I enter a supermarket and speak to cashier in Hindi I feel more confident
of him getting it than I was in Bangalore.
Although it doesn’t look like the Arabian nights here but
yes few things we had in mind while we talked about ‘those gulf countries’ are
actually true. To quote a few, a 1 liter mineral water bottle in a decent
restaurant costs 1 to 3 QARs and 1 liter petrol is worth 0.5 QARs, super petrol
being costly is sold at 1 QARs per liter. Yes, the women wear the long black
dress called abaya and the men wear thobes which is almost the same thing
but white and also it doesn’t cover the face. Have seen some very young guys
wearing the thobe thing which apparently looks very
uncomfortable. But this is confined only to the Qataris, so that is 1 in 5
people here. Apart from them all others wear whatever they want. Once you enter
a mall it doesn’t look any different from Bangalore or Delhi.
To classify the Indian population here, most of them are usually
the people who are employed by some construction company for the elementary
building jobs, infrastructure being on a boom here offers a lot of
opportunities for them to work here and save more, these people are mostly from
UP and Bihar, so you would hear all kinds of north Indian slangs here. Other then
them it’s the IT guys who are here for a short stay and look rather flummoxed
most of the times. Then of course there are the people from Kerala in their
favorite destination ‘gelf’ , who are doing some small business and are here
with family, and believe me they are in plenty, so much so that for the sake of
small talk if you start a conversation with a taxi driver and tell him you are
from India (though we hardly need to tell that), the next question mostly is ‘Where
in India? Kerala?
Another thing which is unusual here is lack of public
transport, it’s almost absent. Mostly due to the petrol prices and also the absence
of taxes, which allows almost everyone to own a car and keep driving it day and
night. Though I am not someone crazy for cars, but the cars here are rarely something
which will not make you turn your head.
