Weirdos who shop and get stuck in traffic
Traffic is an endlessly boring topic, I know. I hate it too when people drone on about it. But permit me two lines. Or, okay, one: ‘I have never seen worse traffic in this city than this Friday’. It was ‘White Friday’, the heavily discounted day when you get lots of stuff for a quarter of the price.
When consumers go wild in an attempt to save Dh800 buying phones that otherwise retail at Dh3,300. Deals like that. There they were, the prepared shoppers, circling parking spaces like hawks in the infinite malls this city has to offer.
I gave up on going to Ikea to buy cheap gifts because I saw how clogged the roads were. The only other time I have seen it worse was on the day Dan Brown was to talk at the Sharjah International Book Fair a couple of years ago. I left office at a quarter past 4 to make it for some 7pm session. Couldn’t. One word: Sharjah.
Gifting, to me, is an endlessly fascinating topic. The politics of gifting, rather. I’m going home later this week. I have a bunch of things all bought for people I like — all right, ‘love’. But the peripherals, my god, the endless peripheral people who expect. What does one do with those? I guess, if you’re smart, you circle, take shape of that hawk and swoop to get the best deals. So that the poor sods back home have no idea how much you shelled out. A princely Dh20 for some cheapo thing? Excellent. Such are the wonders of e-commerce and the thriftiness it enables. ***** Two former colleagues sit in a cab. One starts talking to the other about a third colleague. The car fills with good natured banter. Some though call it gossip. A says: “She’s so weird, no? Don’t you think she’s really weird?”
Gifting, to me, is an endlessly fascinating topic. The politics of gifting, rather. I’m going home later this week. I have a bunch of things all bought for people I like — all right, ‘love
B says: “Weird? How do you mean?” A: “No, like how some people just are. Don’t you think, she’s always trying to prove a point?”
B: “But that’s like a lot of people, no? How does that make her especially weird? Everyone doesn’t have the same yardsticks for weird.”
A: “Come on, man. What are you saying? There are some universal yardsticks.”
B: “Are there? I’m not sure. People have different taste in people. You may think someone is bananas. I may disagree. Or I may agree on the weirdness but for different reasons. Impossible is nothing, Adidas is right, babe.” A: “Don’t you think there are some things that people say or do that make them universally weird?”
B: “Okay, maybe you’re right. If people make it a habit to start biting the tarmac or come to work with orange feathers sticking out, I guess some questions could be raised. But just because — (gets cut off)”
A: “No, I just feel she feels she’s better than most people”.
B: “Well, maybe she is? And in any case, how is that weird? That’s human. Most people think this. So, what? Do you think you’re less weird than most?!”
Cab ride comes to an end.
***** Last week, I read a ‘Lunch with the FT’, in which the UN secretary-general António Guterres tells Gillian Tett,
“A crucial lesson for my political life is this very simple (psychological) analysis: when you have two persons in a room, you do not have two, you have six: what each person is; what each person thinks he or she is; and what each person thinks the other is. This is the reason personal relations are so complex. But what is true for persons is true for groups, and countries”.
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com