‘Kindness and friendship don’t carry a passport’: Why Dubai left a lasting impact on this Indian expat

Dubai: Two years in Dubai. That’s all it took to completely change Indian expatriate Manisha Dubey's understanding of people.

It has defined her outlook in life and how she approaches people, even today, years after she left the UAE.

In 2018, the 33-year-old marketing and communications professional arrived in Dubai just after midnight, alone and anxious. This was the first time she had travelled to a foreign country. But the first person she met – a driver holding her name on a placard, who she would later call “Javed Bhai” (brother Javed), gave her the first experience of what life in Dubai would be like.

“[He was] the first kind face I saw in a new country. He didn’t have to be warm. He was a driver doing his job. But he was kind in the way that only people who have themselves arrived somewhere new and scared can be,” she told Emirates 24|7.

That first act of kindness would become the beginning of a much larger lesson about Dubai.

“That's Dubai's quiet secret – most people there have their own version of that midnight landing story. And that shared experience of having started from somewhere else creates an unspoken kindness between strangers that I haven't quite found anywhere else,” she said.

Dubey had arrived in the city for work, and once Javed dropped her off at her accommodation, she discovered that her only roommate was from Pakistan. It didn’t take long for the two to hit it off.

“She offered friendship before I even knew I needed it. Took care of me like an elder sister. Became my family when I had none around. We stood by each other through everything - the highs, the hard days, and every cricket match where we happily went full cousins-at-a-family-gathering mode on each other. Not once did it feel like we came from two different countries,” she said.

And that, she says, is what makes Dubai special – it makes perceived differences disappear and people focus more on where they are going, instead of where they are coming from. Something, that she says, is “quietly radical”.

“It strips you down to the essentials – who are you when you're on your own? Who shows up for you when no one is watching? And what you discover is that kindness, loyalty, and friendship don't carry a passport,” she said.

When humanity and ambition co-exist

Calling Dubai one of the most ambitious cities in the world, Dubey said that she saw people constantly chasing their dreams, building something and becoming someone.

“And yet, underneath all that motion, there is a stillness in its people that I didn't expect. I think it's because ambition, when shared, becomes something different,” she said.

This is a lesson that has stayed with her, even after family commitments meant moving back to India after a two-year stay. Today, as a marketing and communications lead at a sustainable packaging company in India, those lessons continue to shape the way she sees people.

“The relationships I built in Dubai were never transactional because we had nothing to trade except our time, our stories, and our presence. And that has changed me professionally in ways I'm still discovering. I don't believe in keeping people at arm's length at work. I don't believe that professionalism means being guarded or that vulnerability is a weakness in a room full of colleagues. I carry that into every room I walk into now. The work matters, but the people doing it matter more.”