Last Friday was the first time the Chinese fine dining resturant at the Pearl, Tse Yang, hosted a Friday brunch. Having lived in Doha for 6 years now, I generally run away when there is a brunch because of the infamous Doha Dozen or Doha stone. I've gathered more than my share of both; but it sounded unique enough that I was curious. Tse Yang has been brought to The Pearl-Qatar by Hospitality Development Company (HDC) and is famed worldwide for the elegance and sophistication of its authentic Chinese cuisine.

My husband and I attended what will likely fast become our favorite brunch and gorge alternative. Tse Yang has a family friendly feel with a room dedicated to children's activities so if you have little ones (like we do, toddler age) you can feel safe that they won't run through the halls as may be the case at hotel brunches. Face painting, stuffed animals, and other activities keep the young ones busy while you taste the finer points of the splendid buffet.

The Tse Yang story began in Paris, the culinary capital of the world, in 1980. Since then it has brought its unique blend of classic Chinese cuisine and contemporary dining to cities as far afield as Geneva, Munich, New York and now Doha. The name Tse Yang refers to part of Beijing’s famous Forbidden City and is designed to evoke the glamour of the Chinese emperors.

And there's nothing spared from the elegant menu on Friday: from crab legs to dumplings and the dim sum trolley that makes its rounds through the resturant, you can sip to your heart's content and feast at a pace only possible with the delights of the far East. Save room for dessert as the bite size treats are the perfect way to top off an indulgent afternoon.

A few weeks ago we heard with surprise that Steve Jobs was stepping down from the helm of Apple Inc. Jobs is the legendary visionary who brought us a different operating system and then changed the way we listen to music, browse the Internet, talk on our phones. His iconic leadership had everyone from news to technology pundits wondering what this meant for the future of Apple.

What most people are quick to gloss over, however, is the fact that Jobs developed his signature style and ability to not only set trends but establish markets through a tumultuous upbringing including beginning life as a child given up for adoption. He dropped out of college, relied on the technical knowledge of his friend Steve Wozniak to impress people at Atari, did drugs. In short, he wasn’t the kind of person you’d talk about to high school kids as a role model – that is until he became one.

Jobs’ story is not that different from many other successful people. The truth is that we like to focus on the now, the moment of brilliance, rather than the hours, days, years, or all the people and resources that helped a successful person achieve their moment(s) of fame.

The truth is it’s easier to think that it was easy for Jobs to become a tech guru, for Beyoncé to establish herself as a soloist, for Spielberg to make films about aliens. Thinking of success as an overnight flash in the pan, shooting to the bestseller list, absolves us of the hard work that these and other household names put in night after night, year after year.

A New York Times bestselling novelist once laughed when someone asked her how it felt to be an overnight bestseller. “It took me nine years to publish my first book,” she said. “That was one very long night.” You may have read some of her work: Jodi Picoult, author of My Sister’s Keeper among other some nineteen plus novels.

You want to be successful? You want people to know who you are, respect your ethics, admire your ideas? Then put the time in to make it the strongest, biggest, best, -- not of the world – but that you can do. And keep doing it. Eventually it will pay off. The question is: how serious are you about your dream?

Because I’m a writer (and have published/edited a few books), people often ask me for writing advice. There’s an e-book I’m putting together as a result of two years of blogging for the UK based Writers and Artists’ Yearbook. But for those who can’t wait, here is a list of the basics.

Unclear Motives
Do you want to record your family history for posterity or make your living selling your work? Many people are not being honest with themselves as to the real reason they are interested in being published. This deserves a lot of pondering before you even think about the market as it will determine a range of choices including commercial versus self-publishing.

Bad Approach
This includes everything from getting the person’s name wrong that you are corresponding with or even worse, not even knowing whom you are addressing. This can also include misspellings or bad grammar in the query letter, or sending an electronic submission when they only accept paper, in short failing to follow directions.

Unfinished Material
You’re a first time author with a concept but no pages; this makes you very risky for an already embattled industry that needs assurances about how many copies may sell. Take the time to polish and refine your work for your agent, editor, and readers’ sakes.

Fuzzy Process
If you’ve never published a book, then perhaps the people in the machine who make the magic happen may be relatively unknown. Publishing a book is a relatively intensive process with dozens, if not more, people involved. Each of them is an essential part and each of them needs to believe in the story you’re telling.

Short Sightedness
Most publishers want an author, not just a writer; that is to say, they’d like to know what the next book is that you’ll be working on while your first one is on the shelves. This pipeline system is necessary for a process that can take up to a year or longer to get a book out to the market.

Recently someone wrote to me asking me if I thought he would harm his changes for publishing if he moved overseas. I found this question slightly strange since most of the publishing process happens remotely – a book I wrote on Hip Hop dance, for example, was done entirely over email. So it didn’t matter where in the world I was, just that I was writing, and hard at it in the final days to get the manuscript in.

And that is the best advice I can give. If you want to be a writer, take the first step. WRITE. Publishing, book tours, fame, fortune, those all come after.

“I’m at a conference,” is often code for: I found a great way for my job to pay for a vacation. But don’t dismiss these opportunities for what they really are: your professional development and a chance to get out of your chair in the office and into the rest of the world.

A lot of people may go to professional events but not know what they’re doing there --other than to eat free food or try out some exotic locale. Or even worse, many likely pass up on networking events, training, or presentation opportunities because they’re too intimidated by not knowing anyone else attending. The fear of the unknown setting can be particularly tough on introverts who prefer to get energy from themselves anyway, rather than crowds of people.

Most companies recognize the importance of learning new techniques, refreshing old ones, and giving value to building active communities and set aside funds for staff development. However, if you’re not in one of these categories, if you have a spare weekend, or desire to improve yourself, then self-identifying a conference is a great way to re-energize, get more ideas, and further build a network of people who may be interested in similar topics. The spring is often conference season: I found myself thinking how glad I was I had participated in two in the month of April – though it makes life very hectic.

In mid April I was a part of a panel at one of the largest academic conferences on writing held in the U.S. The conference had around 3,000 people attending and I had about 15 minutes on a four person panel talking about participatory cultures; each of us spoke about a different part of the world and their online communities. This experience at as “newcomer” (they even had a table for us first timers) to this huge conference reminded me of why conferences are overwhelming – and important.

For those just stretching their professional wings, starting with local events can be a good step. In Qatar, many of these events are free. There are as many events as there are people; in one week you could go to something at the Mathaf museum, or the Qatar Professional Women’s Network, or Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation and Carnegie Mellon Qatar’s translation conference.

There are lectures offered weekly and monthly by other organizations such as the Brookings Doha Center. These are low risk as they are local, free, and if you wander around for more than ten minutes without saying hi to anyone, you can always leave. Guaranteed, however, is that if you go to enough of these in Qatar, you will start to recognize familiar faces.

One basic way to meet people in a meaningful way, whether at a small event in Doha or large international gathering, is to ask questions. When you ask questions, people notice you, and they have been thinking along similar lines. This can often lead to a conversation after the event with someone you may not have known.

Another way, if you are presenting, is to get to know your panelists better by having coffee or lunch following your presentation.

You’ll find most conferences have socials in the evening, where you can tour the cit y you’re visiting, or meals in an interesting place. While sometimes these may be tedious, scanning a program to something of interest is another natural way to start a conversation.

Remember: You don’t have to the conference extrovert: being everywhere, all the time. Pick your moments and the people you hope to meet. The most helpful person is not always the keynote speaker or the most well known. These people may not have time to chat about your latest idea, or introduce you to others.

But the conference organizer, the person who puts together panels or those sitting at information desks can often be excellent sources of information and are involved in the event because they are passionate about what they are working on.

Ultimately you can’t benefit if you don’t show up. Using other people as a resource is a great way to take a break from your own responsibilities and be trained yourself. Being your own manager is the critical for anyone in the modern workforce.

Traditional theorists like Karl Marx, tend towards the negative when talking about large groups of people or “the masses.” If you’ve seen The Gladiator, then you know that Rome is ruled by a “mob” of people or the majority opinion. Generally the phrase is used to describe a large group of average people as lacking any good sense or attributes in general.

But there’s a growing counter-trend to this intellectual snobbery that more people means less value.

A few weeks ago I attended a dinner and then a lecture given by co-author of Macrowikinomics, Anthony D. Williams on a visit sponsored by ictQatar as part of their Connected Speakers series. Despite being a bestselling author and international speaker, he was kind enough to listen to everyone at the table, even when some people tended towards lengthy pontification.

The next night, at the lecture, he answered questions respectfully and thoroughly after speaking for nearly an hour and half

Now Williams himself is a fairly young guy, so maybe this is part of the reason that he is so down to earth.

Or maybe it’s because he and his co-author Don Tapscott have put into two bestselling books the idea that the masses can be harnessed as social, economic, and political engines of change.

Mass collaboration, or the idea that groups of people working together results in innovation, is the staple of the Williams-Tapscott franchise. First in Wikinomics and now with the sequel, they show how people working together can contribute substantially to the commercial market. From volunteers who mapped the night sky – even discovering a new type of stellar object – to those filling in the gaps in the human genome, Williams and Tapscott’s research is not only convincing, it’s empowering.

“Social networking is changing the way we access information,” Williams said, describing it as “a social web layer” over our world. What we used to think of as tools only for play – Facebook, Twitter – now have proven their worth as platforms to stage revolutions across the Middle East.

If you subscribe to this idea, then of course anyone you meet is not beneath you but an equal stakeholder and contributor in the pursuit of bettering our world and this may have been why Williams was so nice.

I felt energized and empowered after these two days of thinking of the possibilities to do good in each of us – instead of harm, which is what I had been grappling with for a week weeks. Williams’ version of humanity seemed much more positive, so I decided to test out mass collaboration at the first possible instance. My first opportunity was not far away: I was writing a guide for expats new to Qatar and I needed photos. Lots of photos. More than I had on my own in the 6 years I lived here. So I put it on Facebook and Twitter. I didn’t get tons and tons of replies, but I got enough.

Then I had other questions – a couple today even – that I tweeted and sure enough, answers coming right back. Where to buy bean bag chairs and what that fuzz on your sweater is called; from the mundane to the isoteric (what is the word “handbag” in different Arabic dialects?) social media helped me perfect ideas for a TV pilot I’m working on and also make our house more infant friendly.

The debate has been going on for a while. What’s the point of Twitter? Or: “how will it make money?” Perhaps the basic principles of Twitter were part of the problem: the 140 character limit made people dismiss twitting as a frivolous activity. What, they asked, of any substance, could you say in such a short space?

As the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and now Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya show us: quite a lot. The use of social media by young people in these countries to organize and galvanize their compatriots was unexpected. The way professional journalists and the international community have taken up Twitter to understand these struggles is a phenomenon very few people could have predicted

As a writer, I was first encouraged to get onto Twitter when attending some workshops on how to get the attention of a publisher. I kept putting off: they were talking to someone who joined Facebook nearly five years after it launched. It was on my to-do-list but it just never got done – mostly because I kept forgetting whenever I was on the computer. The miracle of the Hudson river plane landing in New York City was reportedly broken on Twitter as someone looked out the window of his/her apartment. Still, no one seemed to know quite what to do with these bite sized packets of information.

Then, one night, alone at a café in Damascus, Syria, taking a break from my Arabic course, I decided to check it out.

The scrolling page of top tweets was saying something shocking: Michael Jackson had died.

I called my husband who was at home in Qatar.

“They’re saying MJ died,” I said in disbelief, thinking this Twitter thing was a big prank after all.

“He did,” my husband replied. I was then in shock (and mourning followed immediately afterward for such a misspent life).

Needless to say, I was hooked. But I still didn’t know how or when to tweet. And living in Qatar, a small community whether amongst expats or nationals, I was self consciously about tweeting particularly since my account was tied to my Linked-In account.

I didn’t want my professional network knowing everything only certain things. So I restricted myself to one Confucius like saying a day. I sometimes scanned what others were saying but that was it.

Then a whole group of twentysomethings joined us at work and critiqued my Twitter style. It turned out I wasn’t tweeting often enough for them. I explained my dilemma: one person pointed out the obvious solution – you just marked tweets you wanted to go through with the #in. Clearly Twitter had gotten much more sophisticated when I wasn’t online.

This new fact was revealed to me at the same time that I got a birthday present: a Smartphone. The two together coupled to make me a frequent and more liberal tweeter.  Leaving all my friends on Facebook without Twitter accounts reading only half the conversation.

From MJ’s death to the independence of Egyptians from Mubarak now to the mounting struggles for liberation from inequality, injustice, and corruption, Twitter delivers the type of news I’m most interested in, in digestible highlights just right for a working mother.

@mohanalakshmi

It happened again: out in public, another angry foreigner speaks to a room at large of his disbelief at the lack of efficiency that surrounds him. I’m using ‘he’ because it was a he; a large man, over six feet tall, lumbering into the Qatar Airways office, escaping the rising afternoon heat. I was idly playing with my mobile, draped in a chair; waiting for the agent working with me to come back and help me untangle the Gordian knot my noncommittal students had made of the group travel plans to a conference (see Lack of commitment continues, March 4^th entry).

 

The belligerent European came in, looked around, took off his sunglasses and said, to no one in particular:

“Is anyone working today or what?”

 

Now, the thing is, I’ve had this same feeling, dozens of times, and in more countries than just the one I’m currently living in. China, Peru, India, even your local U.S. Social Security office, can evoke feelings of despair at Byzantine bureaucratic inefficiency.

 

The thing that piqued my interest was that this man had just arrived. He wasn’t even sitting down. He hadn’t even taken a number from the electronic dispenser as the one other waiting customer had.

 

Essentially, he didn’t have the right to be angry. At least not from where I sat, having waited at least one hour before on a similar visit for similar services.

A sales agent came from the back and the man persisted.

 

“There are only two people working right now?”

“I just came on duty sir,” the petite Pilipino woman said, “I’m turning on my machine.”

 

Now, there are lots of things about class, power, and gender politics I could say here.

But instead, I’ll say I thanked my agent several times for her wonderful assistance, thanked the cashier when he gave me my change, and walked out of the office leaving the steaming overweight Euro behind.

My post workout elation this morning was ruined as the instructor began a familiar dire in these parts: what’s wrong with Doha, i.e. the country of Qatar. What was particularly disturbing to me was the tone of the conversation. As you know, I’m trained in postcolonial, or in other words, to be disturbed by feelings of cultural superiority from anyone one culture towards another.

 

“I have to remind myself this is a third world country.”

 

This statement took my breath slightly away more than the previous hour of high endurance spinning had done because, as you may know, Qatar is in fact not the third world. If by third world you mean limited drinking water, access to education, electricity, or stable government.

 

Which, apparently, the instructor did not intend the label to refer to any of these developmental markers (aside: developing country is today’s parlance, not first and third worlds, as though we don’t inhabit the same planet).

 

She was referring to the fact that all the exercise clubs at the various hotels had been told there would be no exercise classes during the week of a UN conference.

 

“As though those UN types want to exercise,” someone else in the room said.

 

I suppose it didn’t occur to anyone that security was the actual reason we were being banned from these hotels – avoiding a spate of car bombings via the hotel’s exercise club was more likely the reason we were being told to reallocate our schedules.

 

There were general grumblings about lack of culture, laziness among the local population, no drive to work, few ambitions, no beauty in the landscape.

 

The woman at the bike closest to me said nothing and kept glancing at me; I could have Qatari features by some people’s standards and I knew she was trying to figure out why I was being so silent in this rampage on all things wrong with Doha.

 

“Europe has so much culture,” the instructor continued.

 

And about 300 years more history in general I so badly wanted to retort.

 

“Considering people were living here in tents thirty years ago,” another class participant said, “it will take time. Like in Malaysia. It took three generations for change.”

 

I appreciate her point and chose to ignore the reference to tent dwellers. What was anyone living in a thousand years ago? Before I could get comfortable however, the generational mark had struck a chord, and we were off for another round of remarks railing against spoiled young Qataris.

 

 

“Well if someone gave me five million dollars, I wouldn’t be at McDonalds,” another classmate said. I could have hugged her with relief for stemming this tide that I felt swept under.

 

Everyone shared a chuckle, including me. I breathed again fully into my lungs, thanked the instructor for the class and made my way to the shower.

But why are ex-pats so critical of Qataris?

I’m still puzzling over why I was so offended.

 

Was it the self-righteousness? The dismissive admission that there were ‘some’ who weren’t like that but the majority of the nation wasn’t worth much?

 

Or perhaps what made the hairs on my neck stand up was the blatant disregard for the fact that a society in progress needs time as an essential element to aid its growth?

 

“There is no perfect society,” I had counseled a young Qatari woman over dinner the other evening. She was discontent with her family’s imposition of traditional expectations despite having allowed her to go abroad to be educated. When at home, do as the locals do. I sympathized with her, sharing stories of my own bifurcated experiences in the U.S. and returning to India to visit family.

 

Nothing is all black or white. Not people, not governments, not religion. To adopt a non-plural platform is to rid life of potential. If a Qatari went to any of the states represented in our class that morning: Malaysia, Germany (I think), some part of Scandinavia (another guess), India, or the U.S. wouldn’t there be things to complain about in spades?

 

How can people be so obtuse about this basic fact: we all live in glass houses.

 

“We’re not here for the culture,” the McDonalds commenter added, “We’re here for the money.”

This I think is the root of the issue. If the goal of modernizing a society with an eye towards empowering its young people is not made a part of the core of one’s mission here, then no amount of money will compensate for the things you feel you are missing elsewhere – whether conveniences or family members. The people who stay and thrive are those who on some level avail themselves of other opportunities – the travel, the work, or the adventure. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be enough people in this category.

 

I must confess I was on the verge of saying what the Qataris themselves often say:

 

“If you don’t like it here, then go home.”