Life as an Expat...

The unintended consequences of life as an Expat...

Living as an Expat anywhere in the world is almost always a voluntary life experience. Most expats look to live and work abroad for monetary reasons, and almost always, their personal financial position improves with the undertaking of an expat assignment. You normally get paid more, in most cases you enjoy a better tax regime, and most of the daily costs that you would have borne had you remained in your native country is now either taken care of or heavily subsidised by your employer. In short, financially, it is almost always better option.

In addition to the financial benefits, there's a host of non financial benefits, such as a better quality of life, a safer (and at times more sheltered) world to raise your family, the ability to travel and see the world, and many other perks.

In general, the life of the Expat is not half as bad as most Expats would have you believe.

In my own instance, the opportunity to live life as an Expat has brought with it the unintended consequences of having to question my own prejudices, my own world views and my own paradigms. Suddenly, things that seemed straightforward was no longer as simple as I thought. the idea of global warming for instance... an idea so widely accepted in the Western World, has a totally different flavour in the Middle East... where it is widely thought that only countries with no or limited access to natural resources of crude seem to think that global warming is as real or as catastrophic as the West would have us believe.

All Expats enjoy a unique world view... you are not accepted as a local in your host country, no matter how hard you try, and you not an insider in your native country. In other words, in most respects, you are an outsider. Most people find this fact disturbing, but if you on a quest to understanding the ways of the world, then this could in fact be a very interesting vantage point.

It is exactly this awakening that has led me to bloggersphere. We will attempt to use this outlet of blogging to raise many of the issues that the world is grappling with. Some topics will be light-hearted, and some more complex. Some will be seriously written and some will be constructed in academic parlance. All will however attempt to comment on issues that affect people from all over the world, across the political spectrum of East and West. Across the religious divides, of those who believe fervently, and those who believe fervently in nothing.

I hope readers of this blog find some of the things I choose to write about sufficiently relevant, interesting and informative to return for the next installment. My own interest in this blog is to merely find a space to capture my own thoughts, express my own interpretation, and share my own conclusions.

I can assure the reader that I hold views on most things, some very mundane, and some very controversial... These views are my own... informed by my own world view of life as an Expat. For instance, the BP spill in the Mexican Gulf... my view is that the world witnessed an industrial accident and the Americans thought it was the end of the world... 11 people died, and the environment was affected. The world have seen far bigger industrial accidents, with far more destructive consequences, but we survived it, and moved on. BP on the other hand, has responded in monetary terms in ways that are totally unprecedented. Enough said about this topic for now... I will almost certainly return to the subject in future postings. We'll talk about the economic outlook, not from an economist perspective, but from the perspective of the layman. We will peel away some of the complexities of the economist talk, and try to simplify the issues. We'll talk about the Tea Party movement and whether the USA (or indeed the world) will ever be able to live free of racial tension, and we will talk about the impact of technology, in our lives and the lives of governments...

In short... we have a lot to say... and will hopefully say it here... on a regular basis.