Shain of Arabia*

The time has come to at last shed some light. I am going away into the wilderness. People, I am going to Saudi Arabia – the land of sun, sand and burqahs. Now that is about the worst deal life can throw at you. Add to it prohibition and moral police and you pretty much have yourself a 100 ways to get beheaded or mutilated, or stoned (literally!)

I haven’t skipped jobs. My company is sending me there for a year. And I might travel within the next 10-15 days. Leaving Pune for Mumbai, and then off to Riyadh from there.

Saudi isn’t exactly every traveller’s dream. There are, like I mentioned above, a lot of factors that can curb your freedom of …errmmm..action. I am not very upset though. There is always a bright side, especially in a country like Saudi where the sun is always shining rather brightly on you. Here’s looking forward to :

• Learning to appreciate the beauty of a woman’s eyes. I haven’t thought of what I will do if women there wear shades as well. I guess then it would be a hopeless case.
• Staying off beer, and perhaps, just perhaps, reducing this beer belly of mine.
• Learning a little of Arabic, and teach them a little bit of my version of Malayalam
• Camel meat and unrestricted access to beef! SLURP!
• A desert safari (sadly, minus the all-important belly dancers)
• Rediscovering the art of e-mail.**
• Trips to other countries in the middle east – IF my visa allows it
• Mental exercises in imagination. With the all–obscuring burqah, there will be a lot left to my imagination :-D

Every country has it’s oddities, and Saudi is just another on the list, may be I will get to learn a lot from the land, and may be I will return a richer man – in more than one sense of the term. I wont disappear from the Blogosphere. Why, I could even start a Saudi Diary! It's rather a good deal now that I think of it.

So till we meet again, Ma'asalaamah! (that's good-bye in Arabic)

* The epithet was coined by Musafir, when he came to know of my plight…

**Yes, it’s official, the email is now an antique. Sms’s and orkut have destroyed it. We hardly mail nowadays, do we? It’s always a ‘hey, how u doing’ or a ‘what’s up’ scrap on Orkut. That’s what we’ve come to –scraps..Saudi, in a wise move, has blocked Orkut! Throughout the kingdom!