A Portion of My Thoughts.....

Heading towards The Global Village, an iconic tourist destination in Dubai, the landscapes shifted drastically. Concrete and tar gave way to fine sand and pebbles and the bus gave an occasional bump as it rolled along the loose gravel and soil. Towering skyscrapers transformed to lower and older buildings. The true form of the desert by which Dubai is surrounded; began to manifest, shallow but endless piles of sand stretched into the distance. The sun was extending its brilliant rays onto the Earth when the bus whirred to a slow halt by the entrance of The Village. As the name suggests, this place of interest harbours and caters to several nationalities around the globe. When I entered the Village through its massive entrance, I was dazzled with awe. Miniatures of prominent monuments and buildings belonging to famed cities across the world loomed before the tourists, almost smiling as if by way of welcome and greeting. Chinese and Japanese traditional pavilions were silhouetted aga...

My mind was sparked with curiosity and excitement when I awoke the next morning. The reason, you ask? We were going to visit the world-famous Burj Khalifa; and the awe-inspiring, adjoining Dubai Museum! I had become quite accustomed to the metro service by now and had begun to feel like a frequent traveler myself. My train of thought was brought to quite an abrupt halt and change of track when I first caught sight of the magnificent tower of glass, steel, and luminescence that was the Burj. We stepped out onto the metro platform and as we walked along the seemingly endless conveyor belts that would transport us directly into the midst of the supreme Mall, we looked out of the glass panes that lined the station. We couldn’t see the spire’s very top despite craning our necks almost an 180 degrees! So tall was it, that it was quite a Herculean task to capture it even through a camera lens!                ...

Just as our first session of tenth grade came to an end, there was a new cause of excitement for us in the coming days. Our school was organizing a five-day summer spiritual camp for us within the campus, as is done annually for tenth-grade students. It was being held in the hopes of arousing feelings of calm, inner peace and devotion from the soul. I had never been away from home for such a long duration of time and thus, experienced a blend of exhilaration, excitement, and fear preceding the night of the 21 st  of April, the day which marked the commencement of the camp. I, along with my friends arrived with bags packed and vigour replenished on the first morning. We discovered that our comfortable beds back at home had been replaced with mattresses on the floor; and our spacious bathrooms with the school washrooms! Looking at each other, we sighed as realization struck. All of us were in this together for the long haul. We were ten students to a room; which automatically tra...

The city that many people across the globe would like to vacation in; and that had been jokingly but repeatedly requested for as a holiday destination in our family, became a dream-like reality when we flew to Dubai on 29 th March 2017. The two and a half hour flight from Mumbai to Dubai was miraculously smooth. We did not have to endure even an ounce of turbulence, the aircraft being manned with the grace and elegance of none other than a woman aviation crew. It was as if I was in a reverie when I saw the coastline of the Emirates appear, which was previously obscured by the white curling wisps of cloud and mist. The birds’ eye view that I had been offered appeared to trick and deceive me at first, when the tall spires and towers that spiraled away into the sky, and which Dubai and Sharjah; another highly-developed city, as close as 20 km from Dubai were very famous for, still did not come into vision.  All that the eyes could see was endless expanses of sand of varying c...