Ice Cafe in Dubai

It was 43 degrees celcius in Dubai today afternoon when we went to the ice cafe; where the temperature was negative 6 degrees :)...Here are a few pictures of the cafe:
As the name suggests, the tables, the seats, even those cute things hanging from the ceiling - all are made completely of ice.

Then they've made the Dubai skyline out of ice on one of the walls :-)

Thats my drink served in an ice glass at the ice bar.

Relocating to Singapore

We are re-locating to Singapore in August & its going to be a big change! Are we excited at the prospect of living in a new city? Of course we are.

But I’ve spent hours thinking about all the things I’m going to miss about Dubai. I’m going to miss my friends, my apartment, my colleagues, the winters, the shawarmas, the house-help, hommour, DIFC, Shk Zayed Road, sheesha cafes, sheesh-taouk, the half-days in Ramadan, the creek, the weekends in Fujairah, and the general buzz of boom in Dubai...Sigh!

But to answer Nelly Furtado’s question, good things come to an end so that better things could begin! :)

The Black Swan

Nassim Taleb is a probabilist & a hedge-fund manager. I started reading his book out of academic interest in financial markets, but a few pages into the book, I realised that The Black Swan is as pertinent to markets as to life in general.

In the old world, people believed that all swans are white. Then the Australian continent was discovered & people were shocked to find black swans. That is the point of this book.

The universe is unpredictable, and the improbable events are the ones that shape the world. Human mind is programmed to find patterns in events; based on what we believe is empirical evidence. Hence we concentrate on the center of the bell-curve, when in fact we should be looking at the extremes.

The idea is told quite fascinatingly by Taleb, through many stories & anecdotes. The book at no point gets into mathematics, but dwells in the concepts. He extends his Black Swan Theory into interesting alleys of thought: career advice, explanation of wars (or the lack of it), philosophy, why people who don't read newspapers are better off... I didn't quite agree with all the ideas but enjoyed reading them all the same. A very stimulating read.

Just wondering...

...that, if broccoli & spinach were advertised as much and as well as pizzas & chocolates, would they taste as good to us?

The Glass Ceiling

We had this discussion at work the other day: In this day & age, do women still have a disadvantage in their workplace, on account of their gender?

Personally, I have never in my career of 5 years felt discriminated against by my bosses or my colleagues; because I'm a woman.

Yet, there are more subtle disadvantages that I think a woman faces in the course of her career; the biggest of them being the social expectations of getting married & having babies. I know many good female students from my b-school who opted out of careers in order to raise families. The ones who are still in careers & are married, clearly have a preference for 'less stressful' jobs so that they could be home in time to enjoy a quality married life. It certainly is a matter of personal choice & priorities; but is it not also a matter of social conditioning which forces women to see 'home-making' as their role?

The thing about the glass ceilings is that, its easy to miss it even if you're directly under it.

The Lion King

We watched the musical The Lion King at London's Lyceum Theatre. I have been a fan of the animated movie but have been curious to see how it would be presented on stage.

I was so impressed with the production quality of this play: the costumes, the sets, the tools used; are so imaginative and creative! It was quite breath-taking how the scene where Simba loses his dad in a jungle stampede was depicted on stage. Or how the costumes of Scarface & Mufasa made them look evil or majestic respectively. Or how the set of the hyena strong-hold, the graveyard, gave the stage an eerie creepy feel.

I loved it all!