By Bikram Vohra
Special to Gulf Daily Mail
At the very outset, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Sure, we are a bit teed off that we are being targeted. But the gap for the 3 million-plus Indians in the UAE between reality and TV coverage from the home front widens by the day.
Let’s get this straight, right? There’s a small incident off the coast of Dubai—a failed drone attack on some vessels. Now, if you’re sitting in Mumbai or Delhi, glued to certain TV channels, you’d think the sky was falling. The end of the world as we know it.
Oddly, we sense a certain glee that we are under the cosh.
But here’s the kicker, and this is where it gets deliciously ironic. You want to know who isn’t panicking? The expats. The ones with skin in the game.
See, there’s this bizarre, almost schizophrenic disconnect happening. On one side, you have the Indian news studios—and I’m naming no names, but you know the ones—working themselves into a lather. They’re pulling out all the stops. The graphics are flashing red. The anchors have that voice, you know the one, the “we-have-to-talk-about-this-breaking-news” voice that suggests a national emergency.
And what are they showing you? Ah, this is the good part. They’re showing you… a video game. Literally. Some slick footage of missiles hitting a ship, explosions, the works. Looks terrifying, right? Except it’s Arma 3, people. It’s a simulation. It’s pixels. It’s not real.
Or better yet, they dig into the archives. Let’s find the biggest, loudest explosion we have on file from 2015, somewhere in the Middle East, no timestamp, no location tag, and let’s slap it on the screen while we talk about Dubai. Never mind that the actual incident involved a small, possibly failed drone that barely scratched a paint job. We’ve got fireballs to sell! We’ve got TRPs to chase!
And the adjectives! Oh, the adjectives. “Terror strike.” “Major escalation.” “Massive breach.” It’s a thesaurus of doom. It’s designed to make your mother in Punjab pick up the phone at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat.
But here’s what these channels refuse to understand, or perhaps wilfully ignore. The Indian expat—the guy in his apartment in JLT, the professional in Abu Dhabi, the trader in Deira, the army of blue collars—each of us looking at this visual circus on his screen, then looking out of his window.
He sees the metro running. He sees families at the mall. He sees the Dubai Frame lit up pretty as a picture. He sees the cops doing their job, calm and collected. He hasn’t taken a day off. Nobody has.
And he’s got another source, you see. The official source. WAM. The Dubai Media Office. A simple, clear statement: “An incident occurred. It was minor. It’s contained. Life goes on.” No drama. No speculation. Just facts. That, my friends, is the comfort. They’re keeping us in the loop, even warning us of scam artists trying to exploit adversity.
So you have this perfect storm of nonsense. The news channels back home are selling snake oil, screaming “fire” in a crowded theatre that isn’t even burning. They’re creating anxiety among relatives who don’t know any better.
Meanwhile, the people actually on the ground? We’re just shaking our heads, switching off the TV, and going about our evening.
We don’t like what is happening, but no one is on the run.
We don’t like the tensions in the region. But contrary to the television apocalypse back home, nobody here is packing their bags.
Bikram Vohra is a veteran journalist and columnist who has been based in Dubai since the mid-1980s. After beginning his career in India, he moved to the Gulf in 1984 and went on to become one of the most prominent editors in the region, holding senior editorial positions at leading newspapers including Gulf News, Khaleej Times, and Gulf Today. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has written more than 22,000 articles published in over fifty newspapers worldwide. A prolific writer, Vohra has authored six books and an anthology of his columns, and continues to write widely read opinion and humour columns for publications including The Times of India.