Jan 8 2023

It happens to be the 6th of May today- it has been 5 months since I penned an entry. As with most resolutions, this one too has died a natural death. It lasted all of 7 days. However I beg to claim extenuating circumstances. At the last time of writing I was situated in a serviced apartment in Manila- whereas now I am ensconced in my white sofa near the piano- in my home in Dubai. How this came to be deserves a mention but not via one big entry all of a sudden today but rather via several entries- and hence I am planning to resume the journal on Jan 8th rather than May 6th. In terms of cosmic time passages the anachronism is not material so it should be ok. Back in August, I had a reach out by an HR lady from a local conpany in dubai via linkedin. She wanted to know if I would be willing to explore an opportunity. Now this had happened a few times before- however the reach out would usually be engendered via a recruiter rather than the HR department of the concern itself. I had not even updated my linkedin profile with my current work experience- mainly because I just seemed to have lost interest in the whole linkedin phenomenon. It seemed to me that this was a self-selecting platform where the purported over-achievers liked to over-extend their vanity. I can see my wife’s eye-roll as I write this, wherein she will repeat that ambiguous refrain-“ you are not of this world”. Ambiguous because one can never tell whether it is a compliment or a criticism. I think a bit of both.   There is a tut-tutting on the surface for being impractical and not in lock-step with the ways of the world- yet at a deeper level there is a modicum of respect as well.

In any case, these recruiters tended to be faux salesmen and women- who were basically wasting your time. They either had no real position available yet or they were just fishing for resumes but already had a candidate in mind- usually from the United Kingdom- where it was no secret that there was an implicit nexus of professional talent in the one hand and recruiters in Dubai and Abu Dhabi on the other. There were so many residents of blighty that would happily jettison their 50 percent tax regime and relocate to the tax-free good life of the Middle East. The best men or women usually were never selected. Just as within Shell. It just was the way it was. I had been passed on for a slew of jobs in recent times wherein I was easily the most suitable candidate- so I had seen the writing on the wall. I had absolutely no delusions. In fact one of the hiring managers had noticed my visible disappointment during one of these rejections - and had somehow felt sorry for me. So he did me a favour and told me like it was. He said the selection is very little to do with ability. It is to do most with loyalty towards the hiring manager.  Which is to say if you are a hiring manager and you are loyal to a higher power- if said power were to nudge you to pick someone- you cannot really say no or where would your loyalty lie? I knew then that if it had come to this, I would be better off moving out and quickly-because I did not have the desire nor bandwidth to work on cultivating either the required network or the subservience…

I did some due diligence on the HR lady by going in to linkedin and looking her up. She seemed legit- and not a recruiter - and so I said yes. Irrespective of my current employer’s aversion to treating me with some equity, I did want to move back to Dubai to be with family and friends. Something that was a real challenge for me as long as I was with my employer as they did not really have much of a presence in Dubai. So one might wonder, if my employer has no presence in Dubai - how came I to be situated here with such steadfastness?  A topic for the next entry.