what a happy new year

ladies and gentlemen, and whoever reads my blog, (yeah, u are a separate entity altogether) i am back again for the umpteenth time. like the comic character who dies, to get resurrected, only to die again.

quite a lot has happened since i last posted. we somehow made it through to a new year. but with the same headlines for the last two months. time seems to be stuck in a loop. 

"pakistan rejects indian evidence" "india says pakistan must take concrete steps" " economy witnessed a decline of <%> in 2008" " declares record loss, to layoff employees"

yup, its a good time to be a scrooge, no matter how oxymoronic the sentence reads.

for those concerned about my welfare who number the same as a million divided by a million, well i got some good news and bad news.

good news is, i am on a payroll. bad news is this is the worst time to be, in the middle east. for too long now, governments have invested way too much into the economies, without serious development of local manufacturing industry. falling oil revenue, and rising budgetary allocations coupled with serious hedging of funds in the american economy has left the region exposed.

the biggest employer here, apart from the government, is the real estate. the real estate market witnessed a boom in the UAE because of the freehold visas, wherein anyone purchasing property here in dubai was promised a long term residency visa. rising demand led to the influx of a lot of speculative buyers, who were looking to make quick profits in short term.

as prices rose, higher bonuses had to be paid, which soon rubbed off on other sectors as well. salaries for the upper management rose faster than the airbus a340, and the great middle eastern boom was born.

needless to say, as property prices crashed in the aftermath of the subprime fiasco, the rulers here lost a huge amount of investment. now, the media has finally gotten around to admitting that all's not well here, and officially, 3200 people have lost jobs in the last quarter. conventional wisdom tells me you multiply that number by about 20, to get the real picture.

newer construction projects have been put on hold, and existing ones have witnessed a tremendous slowdown. property prices are in a freefall, as buyers are indulging in panic selling, to recover whatever amount they can, frmo their investment.

now, here's where we come in with the killer punch. 

i work as a PR Coordinator remember? well, i am a PR Coordinator for a construction material manufacturing company. go ahead and laugh for a good 5 minutes. man, i've got my work cut out for the next few months