Krish Ashok: Doha, bland as a tasteless salad

Doha, Qatar, is a strange city. It is, of course, spectacularly ultra-modern, with skyscrapers that would put most American cities to shame. It has roads that are good enough for spoiled brats of millionaire sheikhs to drive their Lamborghini Countaches around, right alongside the almost quintessential Arab vehicle: no, not the camel, the Land Cruiser.

If the even-toed ungulate was the original ship of the desert, the Land Cruiser is definitely the spaceship. No local worth his salt (and desalinated water) will be caught driving desi cars like Toyota Camrys and Corollas. The city looks like a battlefield between modern cityscaping and the merciless desert.

There are lawns even, with sprinklers working overtime to persuade grass to grow in conditions that definitely violate some Geneva Convention on plant rights. There are palm trees lining most roads and advertising hoardings large enough to be seen from space, but it all still seems strange. It doesn't fit somehow.

Perhaps I'm being insular, but tents and camels are what come to mind when the blazing 41-degree Celsius heat hits you when you get out of the airport in late summer. Everything is air-conditioned.

I won't be surprised if the insides of garbage bins were air-conditioned too, to prevent garbage from smouldering into alien life forms. The only entertainment (and relief from the oppressive weather) in Doha seems to be malls, and there are quite a few. We went to one of them. It was designed to look like Venice from the inside. It actually had canals and gondolas. But there was a certain dissonance I just couldn't get past. The mall was European looking but it almost seemed as if it was forced into the place. It seemed like a farmer being forced into a three-piece suit. Most cities in the Middle-East have that feel. Their modernity doesn't feel like Arab modernity. It feels like American modernity sprayed on top of a reluctant local culture. It's no different from the chap who puts on an American accent at a McDonald’s in India, except this is on an unbelievably massive scale. There are three distinct kinds of people who live there too.

The locals, who drive around in super-luxury cars; the white expats, usually oil executives who dress casually in cargo trousers and summer prints; and the brown expats, the engine of the economy. Workers from South Asia seem to dominate the demography in every one of these cities.

Their living conditions aren't anything to write home about but the dirhams and dinars make a huge difference to their families back home in India, Bangladesh or Indonesia. There is a certain permanence to this setup that exists nowhere else in the world.

Black slaves eventually mixed with Europeans to form a multiracial country like Brazil, but I don't see Arabs, Caucasians and immigrant labourers ever being anything other than a salad, loosely mixed together and quite often, not tasty.