May 14, 2025 – Brown Pundits

Zachary L. Zavidé
May 14, 2025

Dubai: Rendered, Rooted, and Ready for the Future

Date: April 29, 2025 | Location: Dubai

Dear Friends,

I’ve been to Dubai countless times. I even got married here.

An Arabian Night

But this trip—technically for work—landed differently. Something in the skyline had shifted. And this time, I saw it.

The City That Clicked

Dubai isn’t a city in progress anymore. It’s a city in command. The lighting, the landscaping, the infrastructure, the energy—after decades of relentless building, it has finally snapped into harmony.

Celestial

For years, Dubai dazzled. Now, it breathes. Someone quipped to me, “Here, fuel is cheap—but water is expensive.” They weren’t wrong. I found myself driving 20km stretches without thinking twice—distances that, in the Home Counties, would take you through ten towns and two sets of speed cameras. Everything here is scaled differently: the lighting spectacular because energy is almost free, the landscaping evolving into more “natural” forms with drip irrigation discreetly running through the sand. And the traffic? Dubai has less congestion than Calgary. That says everything.

Continue reading 🌇 Dispatch from Dubai: The City-State That Arrived

It’s been startling—at times dispiriting—to witness the tenor of Pakistani responses to recent BP posts. Not just the jingoism, but the denial. A refusal to acknowledge the civilizational reality of India before 1947. It isn’t just ahistorical—it’s tragicomic. And it reveals a deeper pathology: the English-speaking Pakistani elite is afflicted with Post-Colonial Derangement Syndrome. Omar has long argued this. I’ve become a convert over the past decade.

I love Pakistan. But that love doesn’t require denying India. I can honour my father and mother without disfiguring one to exalt the other. Civilizations are not exclusive claims—they are overlapping inheritances. Nationalism demands we choose. Patriotism allows us to belong. One blinds. The other binds.

Pakistan’s identity hinges on rupture. It claims to be not Hind, not Bharat—something purer, separate, superior. And yet, its elites remain obsessed with India. At least the Koreas and Vietnams acknowledge their shared past. Even China and Taiwan did—until foreign interference fractured that memory. But here? Not even a name is spared. There is no sign of “India” in the very land that birthed the name. If India truly didn’t exist in the Pakistani imagination, why the resentment? Why the rivalry? The schizophrenia is telling: deny the mother, envy the sibling.

Take Kashmir. If this is a political conflict—not religious—why were the victims in Pahalgam targeted as adult Hindu men? That wasn’t strategic. It was sectarian. Either the attackers acted from religious hatred, or the political cause they serve is entangled with it. You cannot claim secular nationalism while endorsing ideological murder. Continue reading The Arrogance That Binds: Post-Colonial Delusions in the English speaking Pakistani Mind