Category: UAE

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That day in October when the world really changed

As OPEC+ showed its muscle today, cutting its output and spitting in the face of the US which was seeking lower oil prices, one was reminded of how this organisation first flexed its muscles – 49 years ago, in the wake of what is known as the Yom Kippur War or the Ramadan War.

It was on Saturday, October 6, 1973, that the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan launched an attack on Israel at two minutes to two in the afternoon.

It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar and there had been some warnings of an imminent Arab attack. But these were not taken seriously. Continue reading “That day in October when the world really changed”

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All the news (apart from the Middle East issue) that’s fit to print

The Saturday Paper — as its name implies — is a weekend newspaper published from Melbourne, Australia. Given this, it rarely has any real news, but some of the features are well-written.

There is a column called Gadfly (again the name would indicate what it is about) which is extremely well-written and is one of the articles that I read every week. It was written for some years by one Richard Ackland, a lawyer with very good writing skills, and is now penned by one Sami Shah, an Indian, who is, again a good writer. Gadfly is funny and, like most of the opinion content in the paper, is left-oriented.

The same cannot be said of some of the other writers. Karen Middleton and Rick Morton fall into the category of poor writers, though the latter sometimes does provide a story that has not been run anywhere else. Middleton can only be described as a hack.

Continue reading “All the news (apart from the Middle East issue) that’s fit to print”

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History lessons at a late stage of life

In 1987, I got a job in Dubai, to work for a newspaper named Khaleej (Gulf) Times. I was chosen because the interviewer was a jolly Briton who came down to Bombay to do the interview on 12 June.

Malcolm Payne, the first editor of the newspaper that had been started in 1978 by Iranian brothers named Galadari, told me that he had always wanted to come and pick some people to work at the paper. By the time he got the oppotrunity to do so, he had been pushed out of the editorship by both the Pakistani and Indian journalists who worked there.

For some strange reason, he took a liking to me. At the end of about 45 minutes of what was a much more robust conversation than I had ever experienced in earlier job interviews, which were normally tense affairs, Payne told me, “You’re a good bugger, Samuel. I’ll see you in Dubai.”
Continue reading “History lessons at a late stage of life”