When I came to Dubai nearly four years ago to write a book, the great financial crisis that was to afflict much of the world had just begun to take shape. In the event, one of its most notable victims was this tiny Emirate, a city-state that had risen out of the Arabian littoral’s unforgiving desert and become a global metropolis in barely two decades. Its economy was hit hard, and it is still recovering.   Now another crisis is in full bloom – the popular revolt in Egypt ...

A Farewell To Dubai   By Pranay Gupte (Published in The Hindu, India’s national newspaper, November 26, 2010)   Perhaps it was the good feeling generated by the visit this week to the United Arab Emirates by the septuagenarian President Pratibha Patil of India, or perhaps it’s the fact that the octogenarian Queen Elizabeth II – whose country, Britain, formerly governed the Gulf region – arrived as a supplicant just as Mrs. Patil left with a bagf...

The Most Brilliant Minds I Have Ever Met / By Pranay Gupte   During the course of a long journalistic and writing career, I have had the privilege to meet some of the smartest men and women of my time. They have had an impact on me because their staggering intellects, their ability to synthesize ideas, their modesty, and their natural inclination to find solutions to societal problems. I learned a lot from each one of them – most of all the humbling reality that I could never ma...

Gone: The lions and the lionesses   By Pranay Gupte (Published in The Hindu, India, November 2, 2010)   In life, as in parables, there are lions and lionesses, and there are snakes. There are the good, and there are the greedy. There are those who smile, and there are those who stab. There are friends who limn one’s life with the joy of learning and laughter – but, like lions and lionesses, they are few and far between. Rarer still are friends who double as m...

THE PAST IS NOT PROLOGUE   By Pranay Gupte (Published in The Hindu, India, June 18, 2010)   I traveled to Boston a few days ago to attend the 40 th reunion of my college class, my first such get-together with former classmates since I graduated from Brandeis University in 1970. I went because I hadn’t stayed much in touch with them, I went because I was curious how their lives had played out over these long years, and I went, perhaps most of all, to revisit the pa...

By Pranay Gupte   He was the last of the giants, those tough men of the Bedouin desert who formed a new nation out of a harsh environment, those visionaries who created a country that would occupy a special place in the global firmament.   Sheikh Mabarak bin Mohammed Al Nahayan, who died on Wednesday, occupied a special place himself in the hearts of fellow Emiratis. He was the first Minister of the Interior of the United Arab Emirates, and he helped start and sustain w...

Twenty-five years ago on this day, my father died in Mumbai. Had he lived, he would have turned 100 today.   I was not with Balkrishna Gupte when he died after a long illness that, to this day, remains mysterious to me. Some physicians said it was cancer of the esophagus, others said it was complications from a botched surgery of the alimentary canal. Still others offered other reasons – unpronounceable medical conditions with fancy names that only doctors could decipher. In...

CLASSIC "DEAR JOHN" NOTE NUMBER ONE: (Woman to Man) There is something the matter. I sense your distance. I sense that this relationship has become a burden for you. Financially, it always was, I guess. But now it is more. Each time we talk, you accuse me of having ill-treated you. I am left feeling guilty that you would come to me but for the fact that my behavior with you has been erratic, neurotic. I accept. You may think I am stupid, but I understand these things. I have been h...