Rob The Writer

 A genie offers me a perfect space for reading and writing. The kind of wish people usually waste on views, leather chairs, and Instagram lighting. I start somewhere else. Before furniture, before walls, before shelves groaning under the weight of books, the first requirement is control. Control of attention. Control of intrusion. Control of noise. Silence is not an aesthetic choice. It is a functional one. Without silence, thought cannot complete a sentence. It gets interrupted, diluted, sold off in fragments. So yes, the place is quiet. Not reverent quiet. Not sacred hush. Working quiet. The kind that allows an idea to survive long enough to be interrogated. Then come the books. Lots of them. Not decorative. Used. Marked. Dog-eared. Books that argue with each other across the room. Books that disagree with me. Manuals, memoirs, theology, engineering, history. Raw material. If I cannot reach out and pull down a contradiction at arm’s length, the space is lying to me. But book...

 Leonard Cohen does not belong in a scented candle aisle or whispered over a yoga mat. He belongs where rules are enforced, money talks, desire is policed, and people learn to live with contradictions without pretending they are resolved. Which is why he works just fine in Umm Al Quwain. I am not interested in the soft, romanticized version of Leonard Cohen that gets trotted out to soundtrack heartbreak montages. That Cohen is a caricature. The real one wrote about love without apology, faith without comfort, and power without flinching. He understood systems. He understood restraint. He understood what happens when the rules don’t care how you feel. That puts him closer to life in the UAE than most people are willing to admit. Umm Al Quwain is not Dubai. It does not sell fantasy. It does not pretend to be a global playground. It is a place where things are allowed, disallowed, tolerated, or ignored depending on context, timing, and who is watching. You learn quickly that free...