Everybody wants the Dubai story to be a flex. The skyline. The cars. The brunch photos with a caption about "energy."
Mine isn't that.
Mine starts with me walking out of an engineering degree to tell jokes.
B.Tech. Information Science. The respectable path — the one with a clean arrow drawn on it and a family nodding along. I left it.
To do stand-up comedy.
That conversation at home went about as well as you'd imagine.
But the open mics taught me more than the syllabus ever did. The only thing scarier than silence is a polite laugh. That's where the voice got built — not in a brand workshop. On a stage, eating it in front of strangers, learning exactly which word lands and which one dies.
Comedy doesn't pay rent, though. Not at first.
So to keep the lights on, I took a job on a support line for Microsoft's global team — consumer chat first, then B2B voice. Windows crashing. Azure on fire. Some guy in another timezone furious about Office at 3 AM my time.
I got good at it. Promoted fast. Trained the new hires. Learned the thing no course teaches you: how to stay calm and clear while someone's whole day is falling apart on the other end of the line.
Headset by day. Mic by night. A dropout's degree, basically — and a better one.
Then came the agencies. The 18-person team. Government clients, tourism, a fintech rocket I rode from $100K to $3M. Jaipur was good to me. Maa's daal chawal was always a staircase away. Comfortable.
Which is exactly why I had to leave.
Here's what I've learned about comfort: it's a slow tax on ambition.
You don't notice it. The work's fine, the city's home, the food's perfect. And one day you realise you've optimised your entire life to never be uncomfortable again — which is just a polite way of saying you stopped growing.
Dubai isn't comfortable. That's the point.
It's a city full of people who also packed a bag and bet on themselves. No one here is impressed by where you're from. They want to know what you're building. It's the most honest crowd I've ever pitched to.
So I moved. Not for the skyline. For the friction. For the rooms where everyone's a little hungry. For a clean page in a city that doesn't hand you anything for being comfortable.
I build my whole media and growth operation out of here now — culture, AI, and business growth, run like an operator instead of a hobby.
The rest of who I am and how I got here lives over here.
I didn't move away from home. I moved toward the version of me that home was a little too cosy to produce.
And if it all goes sideways? Maa's daal chawal is a flight away instead of a staircase.
Worth it.
More field notes in Hyperthoughts — culture, AI, craft, and life, from Dubai.
Abhileen Singh Saluja — That Hyperactive Sardar Find me: Website · Instagram @abhileen.ai · LinkedIn