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'Thank you Dubai, for everything'

Salim first arrived in Dubai in 1976. He was offered a job as an accountant with Al Futtaim Construction. "I used to stay in a building near the Clock Tower. There were very few buildings and cars in the city at that time. At night, it used to be so quiet that we could hear the clock chime. Now we can hardly hear it, thanks to the hustle and bustle of the busy city," Salim recalls, noting the changes the city has gone through over all these years.

What particularly fascinated Salim when he arrived here was the city's rich diversity. "When I was preparing to come to Dubai, I remember buying a lot of teach-yourself-Arabic books in Pakistan so that I could communicate with people here in Arabic. But to my pleasant surprise, when I landed in Dubai, I found that almost everyone either knew English, Hindi or Urdu. The books that I had bought to teach myself Arabic have been gathering dust since then. I never had the need to study them!"

Commenting on the ease of life in Dubai in those days, he says, "My family arrived six months after I came to the city. At that time, expats could call their families to live with them without having any ceiling on their earnings to be able to do so. Even taxi drivers and construction workers who earned very low salaries had their whole families living with them."

He then goes on to add that even medical services were delivered to people free of charge. "There were no hospital charges, no doctor's fee and no paying for the medicines prescribed. Everything was free. It remained free for many years till people started misusing the services," laments Salim.

But there have been tremendous developments over the past few decades insofar as public services are concerned. For instance, Salim says everything was done manually in those days as computers were still a far cry.

Says Salim, "This posed a big problem for visa processing. I remember that there used to be very long queues for getting visas. The visa office used to open at seven in the morning, but people used to start queuing up from the middle of the night. When I wanted to get visas issued for my family, I went to the visa office at 4am only to find dozens of people already in front of the office. Everything is computerised now. So getting a visa now is just a matter of a few hours!"

Salim, who is now an accounts manager, AFSS, Al Futtaim, has seen the city grow over the past three decades. When he first came to the city, there was just one hotel and the Trade Centre on the Shaikh Zayed Road. The road from Dubai to Abu Dhabi had just two tracks, one for each direction. "Everything used to be covered with sand. Because there was very little greenery at that time. Dubai used to be much hotter than what it is today. Because of the sand and the absence of roads, Dubai Police used to patrol the city on horses at night," reminisces Salim.

"This city has given me and my family a lot. It brought a lot of success to us. To thank her for this, I, in my humble ways, try to serve her in as many ways as possible. As long as I live, I will always love her like my own country and treat it as my home," asserts Salim.

• UAE