Long-time reader relives old days
Patni was visiting a cousin in Dubai in 1978 when he landed a job and never looked back
When Murli C. Patni first visited Dubai in 1978, he had planned to only stay a few days with his cousin, but the Indian expat has ended up spending a lifetime here.
Patni, a retired art director from the Indian state of Gujarat, has been reading Gulf News for “a very long time”. On the newspaper’s 40th anniversary, he felt moved to share his story.
In 1978, Patni had just resigned from his job as an art director in Bahrain for a better deal in Kuwait. But when no one received him at the airport in Kuwait, he decided to return to India.
“I called my cousin in Dubai from Kuwait and he said ‘why don’t you come visit me for a few days?’. I agreed and that decision changed my life,” Patni, who is now “83 or 84”, says.
In Dubai, he decided to check out job openings. An advertising agency in Deira hired him and Patni never looked back. “I liked Dubai, but it was a very different place back then. Everyone lived in Deira — Bur Dubai only had some workshops and scrapyards. There was this one tall building in Bur Dubai — the World Trade Centre — surrounded by desert,” he recalls.
There were frustrations too. “You had to wait three years for your turn to take driving classes after registering in the system. I failed a couple of times and gave up. I still don’t have a driving licence,” he says.
Patni used to spend his evenings and weekends taking photographs around Dubai. He had to send transparencies, also called slides, to Germany for processing as no one developed them in Dubai then.
Patni has worked as an art director and photographer and even did some freelance work for Gulf News in the early 1980s.
Retired now, Patni’s two sons and daughter run a photography studio in Dubai, where he still indulges his passion for photography. “I’m retired now, I can do whatever I like,” he says.