Recession Proof

…. Camel sales have reached more than Dh60 million in the first two days of the ongoing Al Dhafrah Festival in Zayed City, Al Gharbia (Western Region), an official said on Monday.

“The festival challenged the economic recession in its first days; camel sales are very active since the beginning of the festival which points to hot competition coming up between camel owners, more than last year,” Al Ameri said.

Participants in the festival were talking about Emirati Hamdan Bin Ghanim Al Falahi who bought three camels on Sunday worth Dh24 million. The First camel worth Dh10 million, the second worth Dh9 million and the third worth Dh5 million. In addition to that, the same buyer bought other camels totalling Dh32 million.

Another participant sold his camel yesterday for Dh8.5 million.

The rise in camel sales reflects the interest of camel owners to support their camel troupes with the best and beautiful camels. This is particularly relevant as the festival has introduced for the first time the Al Bayraq lap, where each participant is required to participate with a group of 50 camels, and the grand prize for first winner for both Asayel and Majaheem camels is Dh1 million.

 

“That Which I Have Done No Animal Would Ever Do”

But there is no denying the fact that the basis of Samarkand’s fame was born at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and hence during Timur’s reign. Timur is an astonishing historical phenomenon. His name aroused terror for decades. He was a great ruler who kept Asia under his heel, but his might did not stop him from concerning himself with the details. His armies were famed for their cruelty. Wherever Timur appeared, writes the Arab historian Zaid Vosifi, “blood poured from people as from vessels,” and “the sky was the color of the field of tulips.” Timur himself would stand at the head of each and every expedition, overseeing everything himself. Those whom he conquered he ordered beheaded. He ordered towers built from their skulls, and walls and roads. He supervised the progress of this work himself. He ordered the stomachs of merchants to be ripped open and searched for gold. He ordered his adversaries and opponents poisoned. He made the potions himself. He carried the standard of death, and this mission absorbed him for half the day. During the second half of the day, art absorbed him. Timur devoted himself to the dissemination of art with the same zeal he sustained for the spread of death. In the conscious of Timur there was a very fine line separating art and death. It is true that Timur killed. But it is also true he did not kill all. He spared people with creative qualifications. In Timurs Imperium, the best sanctuary was talent. Timur drew talent to Samarkand; he courted every artist. He did not allow anyone who within him carried a divine spark to be touched. Artists bloomed, and Samarkand bloomed. The city was his pride. On one of its gates Timur ordered the inscribed sentence: IF YOU DOUBT OUR MIGHT – LOOK AT OUR BUILLDINGS! And that sentence has outlived Timur by many centuries. Today, Samarkand still stuns us with its peerless beauty, its excellence in form, the artistic genius. Timur supervised the construction himself. That which was unsuccessful he order removed, and his taste was excellent. He deliberated about various alternatives in ornamentation; he judged the delicacy of design, the purity of the line. And then he threw himself again in the whirl of a new military campaign, into carnage, into blood, into flames, into cries.

Timur was playing a game that few people have the means to play. Timur was sounding the limits of man’s possibilities. Timur demonstrated that which Dostoyevsky later described – that man is capable of everything. One can define Timur’s creation through a sentence of Saint-Exupery’s: “that which I have done no animal would ever do.” Both the good and the bad. Timur’s scissors had two blades – the blade of creation and the blade of destruction. These two blades define the limits of mans activity. Ordinarily, though, the scissors are barely open. Sometimes they are open a little more. In the case of Timur, they were open as far as they could go.

Timurs grave in Samarkand, made of green nephrite. Before the entrance to the mausoleum there is an inscription, whose author is Timur: HAPPY IS HE  WHO RENOUNCED THE WORLD BEFORE THE WORLD RENOUNCED HIM.

He died in 1405 during an expedition to China.

–Kapuscinski, Imperium

 

The Eye Of The Beholder

We have grown quite fond of our brothers here in the desert. There are poetry contests here, the poets who line up for days, and who follow the caravans through the Saudi tundra, from Oman, from Yemen, they follow the caravan commiting their reams of poems to the mind. There is a great patience in the camel, a meaningful elegance and grace, these poets live their subject, and for them there is nothing else.  The poems are only sang, and so putting them to the page is beyond us — the slow cadence of the chants, the dancing of the winners, these are good beasts.

 

Al Dhafra Camel Festival 2010

 

Budget Problems …

Greece: George Papandreou, Greece’s Socialist (Pasok) prime minister, is struggling to stop the country “falling over a cliff”, as he put it in a gloomy television address on February 2nd. Yet it was his late father Andreas, a spendthrift Pasok premier, who sowed the seeds of Greece’s crisis with a borrowing spree in the 1980s. The younger Mr Papandreou must now act quickly to curb Greece’s “triple deficit”—swollen budget and current-account deficits, plus a soaring public debt—or risk a humiliating loss of sovereignty to the European Union institutions in order to escape a sovereign default.

Portugal:

It was Portugal’s turn to feel the wrath of investors on Wednesday as the country’s bond market saw one of its biggest sell-offs this year.

Portugal’s benchmark 10-year bond yields, which have an inverse relationship with prices, rose a quarter of a point to 4.68 per cent as investors appeared to target Lisbon following plans announced by Greece to tackle its rising debt levels.

Gary Jenkins, head of fixed-income research at Evolution, said: “Investors decided to sell Portugal yesterday because the Greek announcement suggested Athens might be starting to get its act together.

“But this is not about nasty hedge funds deliberately targeting one country. The sellers of Portugal yesterday were all kinds of investor, from pension funds to hedge funds and banks. This is because of their worrying public finances.”

United States Of America: American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.

Next month Italy and Spain ….

 

MAGNUM

Michael Dell is buying one of the most valuable modern photographic archives for the university where he started his eponymous computer company in a dormitory room in 1983.

Almost 200,000 original press prints from the New York collection of Magnum Photos, the documentary photo co-operative responsible for some of the defining images of the past seven decades, will be preserved, catalogued and made available to the public at the University of Texas in Austin.

The founder, chairman and chief executive of Dell, who acquired the prints through MSD Capital, his private investment firm, did not disclose what he paid.

The archive has been valued for insurance purposes at well over $100m.

The sale had to be approved by all of Magnum’s photographer members, many of whom will receive part of the proceeds as they own the press prints. The photographers retain copyrights and licensing rights. “Magnum’s quite a difficult organisation to get unanimous consent,” said Mark Lubell, managing director of its New York office. “I’ve been told it’s the first time in our history it’s had a unanimous vote.”

“The Magnum Collection is an irreplaceable trove of American and world history,” said Glenn Fuhrman, co-managing partner of MSD. “Given the technical changes that have taken place in the world of photography, including the digitisation of images, a collection of prints like these will never exist again.”

 

CREAM

Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:

1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.

2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.

 

Credit Ratings

 

BABBU SASSI

Known as the “Indian on the top of the world”, Mr Sassi is the crane operator at the world’s tallest building — the 819-metre Burj Dubai. His office, the cramped crane cab perched on top of the Burj, is also his home — apparently it takes too long to come down to the ground each day to make it worthwhile.

 

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