The Qatar Diary

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.