Before he was old enough to travel, books were Paul Theroux's passport to worlds elsewhere. In his delightful new anthology The Tao of Travel: Enlightenment from Lives on the Road, he offers a treasure trove of writing, combining a distillation of observations from his own work and the writing that has inspired him, ranging from mediaeval times to the present-day and including Freya Stark, Rebecca West, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson and Dervla Murphy, among others. The book also offers a fascinating journey through Theroux's own adventurous life, and explores the human impulse to travel at all. At its heart are the joy of travel and the joy of reading about travel.
One of the world's best-known travel writers, Theroux has been travelling for 50 years and writing about travel for 40, recounting his journeys on every continent except Antarctica in hundreds of essays and eight books, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express and Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book award. He has also written fiction, including Picture Palace, winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, and The Mosquito Coast, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was made into a film starring Harrison Ford.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1941, he travelled first to Italy after graduating and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the English department.
Theroux discusses his own formative experience of leaving home and journeying through Italy and Africa. “In travel you’re pursuing something but also fleeing something,” he says. “When I talk about leaving home, I really felt liberated by leaving a situation that I found turbulent, hard to understand and that I objected to.” Among the situations he objected to was the war in Vietnam. “I was a demonstrator, a student agitator. I went to Africa feeling that there was something wrong in the United States and there really was something wrong”.
One chapter deals with the idea of travel as an ordeal. “An instance or two of ordeal is in most great travel books,” he writes. That ordeal tests the limits and endurance of the traveller, and in Theroux’s opinion, “a traveller needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery”. In this way, “the ordeal becomes an adventure, a test of strength and usually has a happy ending”.
He prefers not to carry a camera when he travels as it prevents him looking closely with his own eyes; his memory is the camera. He believes that you can carry what you see in your head, “make a cerebral snapshot, have a vivid memory”, and indeed his narratives are full of vivid linguistic images.
He says the travel narrative, which is the oldest in the world, asks the question: “What am I capable of doing?” Reading about a difficult journey that a traveller has survived can be a comforting experience. “I’m sometimes described as a cantankerous traveller, a grumpy person,” he says. “But I’m not. You cannot be a grumpy traveller. You can write about things critically but when you travel you need to negotiate, have good humour. If you’re a pessimist you won’t leave home. That the path of life is the path of travel is a bit of a cliché but is absolutely true.”
Theroux extols the great virtues of travelling overland, a way to capture the texture and the truth of a country; everything from the changing accents to the subtle variation in landscape. “For me, the mystery of the world is revealed when you’re on the ground. I think that the true character of a country is in the hinterland, where you’re not getting a red-carpet welcome.”
As for the process of documenting his trips, he says writers are separated from non-writers by those who assiduously keep journals. On the road, whenever Theroux gets to a place where there might be a photocopier he posts photocopied pages of what he has written home to his wife. “This enterprise of writing about travel is a very difficult thing; a travel book is often the most minute examination of an autobiography; there’s rarely a time where you account for every moment of every day; life isn’t usually led that way.” In a travel book, however, every moment matters.
Theroux also advocates leaving the mobile phone firmly switched off, rather than being hyperconnected as so many people are in the modern age. Cutting yourself off from home paradoxically allows for vivid -encounters.
The final “tao of travel” is to “make a friend”, and Theroux’s books are filled with marvellous and memorable characters. “Among the most valuable things in my life is making a friend and then revisiting them, seeing that they now have children, for example. You’ve seen the cycle of life. It’s a wonderful thing.”
Theroux also provides some excellent writing advice: “Writing in the present tense calls attention to the writing rather than what is written about. I think this is a lazy way of writing; in the past tense you need to construct it with a little more expertise. You must never call attention to your writing; you call attention to the thing being written about. Bring the reader into the paragraph by writing it well.”
“The storyteller’s intention is always to hold the listener with a glittering eye and riveting tale”, he writes, and indeed he does keep his audience enraptured.
The White Lotus: Season three
Creator: Mike White
Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell
Rating: 4.5/5
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
The specs: 2018 Jaguar F-Type Convertible
Price, base / as tested: Dh283,080 / Dh318,465
Engine: 2.0-litre inline four-cylinder
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
Power: 295hp @ 5,500rpm
Torque: 400Nm @ 1,500rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 7.2L / 100km
The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
India squad
Virat Kohli (captain), Rohit Sharma, Mayank Agarwal, K.L. Rahul, Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Rishabh Pant, Shivam Dube, Kedar Jadhav, Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Deepak Chahar, Mohammed Shami, Shardul Thakur.
SPECS
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Race%20card
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COMPANY%20PROFILE
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The specs
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Transmission: ten-speed
Power: 420bhp
Torque: 624Nm
Price: Dh325,125
On sale: Now
The%20specs
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The specs
Engine: 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo
Power: 398hp from 5,250rpm
Torque: 580Nm at 1,900-4,800rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Fuel economy, combined: 6.5L/100km
On sale: December
Price: From Dh330,000 (estimate)
PRIMERA LIGA FIXTURES
All times UAE ( 4 GMT)
Saturday
Atletico Madrid v Sevilla (3pm)
Alaves v Real Madrid (6.15pm)
Malaga v Athletic Bilbao (8.30pm)
Girona v Barcelona (10.45pm)
Sunday
Espanyol v Deportivo la Coruna (2pm)
Getafe v Villarreal (6.15pm)
Eibar v Celta Vigo (8.30pm)
Las Palmas v Leganes (8.30pm)
Real Sociedad v Valencia (10.45pm)
Monday
Real Betis v Levante (11.pm)
Everybody%20Loves%20Touda
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Nabil%20Ayouch%C2%A0%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarring%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Nisrin%20Erradi%2C%20Joud%20Chamihy%2C%20Jalila%20Talemsi%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E4%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4-cylturbo
Transmission: seven-speed DSG automatic
Power: 242bhp
Torque: 370Nm
Price: Dh136,814
Herc's Adventures
Developer: Big Ape Productions
Publisher: LucasArts
Console: PlayStation 1 & 5, Sega Saturn
Rating: 4/5
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
Moon Music
Artist: Coldplay
Label: Parlophone/Atlantic
Number of tracks: 10
Rating: 3/5
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially