Dubai: It wasn’t until he’d woken up the next day that 49-year-old Indian Portuguese expat Leonard Rego realised he had left the most important piece of luggage in the taxi he took home from the airport.
Passport, laptop, his personal phone … the bag carried almost everything he needed to operate as the head of a strategy, branding and creative agency. But his immediate reaction surprised him: “Oh … it’s okay. I’ll just call the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA).”
But that’s what happens when you’ve lived in Dubai long enough – an unflinching belief that you’re safe.
“I’d done a ridiculously long trip – travelling from Lisbon to Paris and then Bordeaux, came back to Dubai and headed straight to Dar es Salaam [Tanzania]. I had been travelling so much in three weeks … When I came back to Dubai, I took a taxi from the airport, reached my home in Dubai Hills at 10.40pm and just took my bags from the trunk and left, without checking the backseat, which is very unlike me,” he said.
But the next day, as he tried to reach an RTA representative, he found it curious how little he worried.
“It was a long call. They asked me a lot of questions about the colour of my passport and the contents in my backpack. I had my MacBook Pro in it, which I was more concerned about honestly, as I was working on a very important project, apart from my passport, Portugal ID, Emirates ID and about $1,200 in cash and all my banks cards, of course,” he said.
The seriousness with which the representatives handled his call left him feeling even more confident that he’d get his belongings back. The only problem was that after a long night shift, the driver was now asleep, so Rego had to wait a little before he could get a conclusive answer.
At a work meeting later that day, he shared the experience. Of the seven people he was meeting, only one asked him: “Aren’t you concerned?”
He was the only one new to Dubai.
A feeling of safety that spans a lifetime
Later that evening, Rego received his backpack from the same taxi driver.
“Everything was in the bag - passport, laptop, cards, cash, keys ... All of it, exactly as I had left it. I have lived here for 30 years, so none of this surprised me, but what really struck me was how little it surprised everyone around me as well,” he said.
It’s the same feeling of safety Rego had experienced as a young boy, coming back home as a 12-year-old boy, when his family lived near the Salahuddin street in 1990.
“I was coming home pretty late, later than I should have, when a policeman on horseback stopped to check on me. He asked me if I was lost, and I said ‘Yes, I’m trying to find my way back home but it’s a bit hard’,” he said.
The officer immediately called a colleague, and soon a Mercedes pulled up, with the officer helping Rego get back home safely.
“It was very cool because you don’t get that sense of safety anywhere else,” he said.
Where tolerance and ambition co-exist
It was those experiences, along with a strong sense of community and Dubai’s value of tolerance, which always made the city the place where Rego wanted to build his life.
“My folks were here in the 1970s, they built a life here. I was born in Mumbai and lived here for a short time, before going back to India to study. I’d obviously visit the UAE often and eventually moved here in 1998 because I had just turned 21,” he said.
He started off as a copywriter at his uncle’s ad agency, and soon moved to a number of other roles in the same industry, before starting his own agency in 2007.
“My uncle was a bit of a mentor to me, considering we come from a pretty humble background,” he said.
But even as members of his extended family moved to other parts of the world, Rego says he consciously made the decision to stay put.
“Even back then, it was a very special place because every time I came to visit it felt like a different world,” he said.
As a young boy, he remembers the entertainment options Dubai kids had in the late 1980s and early 1990s – Al Ghurair Centre, Sindbad, or the City 2000 arcade.
“We had al Jazeera park in Sharjah and then Mushrif park came later. There were a handful of things you could have done in those days, but there was a very strong sense of community,” he said.
“I remember going to Umm Al Quwain and Ras Al Khaimah, hunting crabs on the beach with my dad and his friends. That was a real community acitivity, as we’d hunt for crabs during the low tide, with other families who we didn’t know doing the same 50 metres away. We also used to go fish under the Garhoud Bridge. It was so quiet back then,” he said.
But it was also the same city where a sense of tolerance and ambition existed side-by-side.
“Even then, things moved pretty fast. I think [it was] that sense of community coupled with the sense of possibility. You could see that things were changing more rapidly here than anywhere else. My father was in the airlines, so we travelled quite a bit and we saw how fast things were moving here,” he said.
The decision to stay has paid off in more ways than one for Rego, who has been running his agency for almost 20 years, met his wife here and has a son who is growing up in a place that is home.
“It’s been a great run. Everything that’s been made possible in my life has had to do with the fact that I chose to stay in Dubai,” he said.
The only option
For a man who works in advertising and is always on the hunt for standout stories, the story of Dubai has been built on decades of collective experiences that have created a sense of belonging for the people who choose to call it home. His latest experience of losing his backpack, not going sick with worry about whether or not he’d get it back, and receiving a level of service and response that left him feeling even more at peace, is just another case study on the ‘Dubai-it’ mindset – to turn bold ambition into extraordinary achievement, with excellence, measurable impact and record-breaking speed.
“This is something I always focus on in my work as well – how do you go from an option to the only choice? Most brands think they get to that point with a strong identity, messaging and repetition. But really, they get there the way Dubai did – by walking the talk, every day,” he said.
“That means doing the hard, unglamorous thing reliably for years, until that reputation becomes everything,” he added.
This move from Dubai being the only option became even more apparent earlier this year, during the regional conflict.
“I had people asking me, ‘Are you going to leave?’ and all I could say is, ‘Leave and go where?’ I have properties in Portugal and India, but going there never crossed my mind. We have options, but it doesn’t mean we will go. Even when it was at its peak in March, I don’t think we ever felt unsafe. It was always a validation of something we had always felt - the UAE definitely has a plan, they just never needed to show it. And the way they handled everything was just very reassuring,” he said.
It was the same approach, Rego says, that made the UAE stand out during other tests like the COVID-19 pandemic, and the way movement restrictions, online permits for going out in case of emergency and community safety were handled.
“There is a lot of foresight [in the planning], it doesn’t just happen overnight,” he said.
His latest experience of losing his backpack was just an extension of the same foresight and planning that has gone in to making Dubai the only option for him, and millions like him.
“The fact that this whole ecosystem has been built with security in mind, not just for residents but also for visitors is amazing. So, for me, I think this is a very, very hard place to beat.”