The current financial downturn may have a positive side. Wives and daughters in the UAE may have to go to work, quietly shattering the ingrained patriarchal view that women firmly belong at home.

As a woman whose grandmothers liberated a whole line of girls from societal and cultural norms, I fully agree with the statement above. It came from a liberated Arab woman, Tasneem Mayet, who heads a female-only team of very skilled investment specialists, in her role as Senior Vice-President and head of investments, FORSA Dubai. Four other Gulf Arab women at the recently concluded DIFC Forum: Ranya Doleh, Elham Hassan, Najla Al Awadi and Noor Sweid, agree that while things are slowly changing for the present generation of educated, articulate and feisty young women because businesses and governments encourage their progress, they are being primarily held back at home.

Generation gap

Dubai’s expatriates are not sleeping very well these days but they have certainly refined the art of queueing.

The worldwide credit crunch has them worried about securing their fiscal futures and that of their families and left them bug-eyed and irritated.

A few months ago, Dubai’s residents were chafing at the bit over sky-rocketing inflation, high prices and high rents but they still found time to be optimistic about the future.

It’s a strange thought, but has anyone noticed how some ailments sound like names of flowers and vice versa?

"I heard you have polyps and they are growing fast," a colleague enquired testily. I was tempted to say, "Oh yeah, they’re in full bloom. I’ve been making my own compost and it’s really helping. The polyps look perfect in the rockery, but I reckon they’ll be better off if I put them in a clay pot and paired them with those lovely herpes I bought from the nursery the other day."

Uncanny as it is, the similarity is also unnerving. Clematis, long hailed as the "Queen of the vines," reminds me of colitis. Wisteria triggers hysteria and the bulbous amaryllis conjures in my mind images of paralysis.

By voting in their first African-American president 232 years after they declared their independence from the British, the United States of America showed the world this week that the power of US democracy is alive and well.

History was made on November 4, 2008, when 47-year-old Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States with young, old, black, white, Latino, Asian and native-American voters sweeping him to power in an unprecedented move for a country everyone else believed would never allow a black man to become the leader of the free world.

We were wrong and the American people got it right.