Dubai: If you drive on the Dubai-Hatta Road long enough, you will eventually find yourself in the middle of the desert. And if you drive a bit more after that, you will get to a shop called Majjan Traveller Services. You could whizz past it, taking it to be your average camping store, but you would be very mistaken.
Ahmad Majjan is a one-of-a-kind man and so is his shop.
He’s an inventor and importer of strange items from Europe, and it’s in this shop where the two come together.
So what do you need to become an inventor? “Time, resources and morale,” Majjan says.
Time
Majjan started out fiddling with his bicycle at the age of 15, taking it apart and putting it back together, deciphering how it worked. It was an interest he inherited from his father, who was the first mechanic and driver in the UAE.
He then studied aero-engineering in Greece, returning to the UAE as a major in the Air Force at 21 years, and started a small workshop. It wasn’t successful, but Majjan persevered. “Failure is success,” he says, “because you tried.”
At 27, Majjan headed to Germany for graduate studies, where he says he learned the importance of organisation and mastering one’s skills. When he returned to the UAE four years later, he opened a new workshop, but once again could not keep it running due to a lack of funds.
Instead, he joined the local Science Club, where he won a gold medal for his thief-catching clock — the clock takes a snapshot of the thief as he stands in front of it, and if he tries to remove it, the clock shocks him and triggers a call to the police.
Majjan went back to Germany in 1999, returning to the UAE for the final time in 2002. Today, Majjan is retired after a long career in the Air Force, but he is working as hard as ever — 19 hours a day — balancing between his day job, family life and passion for inventing.
In 2010 he began a company, MTS Group, which specialises in innovative hunting and camping products. His store, Majjan Traveller Services, is just one of the company’s seven branches. Majjan works in areas as diverse as landscaping, surveillance and GPS, and solar technology.
Resources
When Majjan returned to the UAE in 2002, he was depressed, he says. “Inventing is the most expensive hobby in the world,” Majjan explains, and despite his previous successes — he was hailed for inventing a device that would save children from drowning, and an e-map of the emirates for tourists long before GPS — he was finding it difficult to get financial backing for his workshop and inventions.
Then, he met Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai Crown Prince, who took an interest in Majjan’s work. “He encouraged me,” Majjan says, and in 2003 he became a member of Shaikh Hamdan’s technical support staff.
Although he was able to find backing, Majjan says that there is not enough support in the UAE and the region for would-be inventors and no real direction for them to follow. “We have to take an interest in creative minds,” he says. “There needs to be an institution to go to.”
In the West companies are willing to invest financially in developing and researching creative and innovative ideas, Majjan explains, but here “there’s no real investor to adopt our ideas,” he says.
This lack of funds can be a real hindrance to anyone with a new idea, “Where are our inventors?” Majjan asks, explaining that smart kids end up going into law or other professions where they can make a good living instead of working in a fledgling field.
But at least for Majjan, worrying about money is largely a thing of the past. Any money he makes from his store or from other branches of his company, selling or renting equipment and creations to people and companies around the world, goes right back into research and development of his latest idea. Around once every 45 days, Majjan takes three days off to travel to exhibitions around the world and see what’s new in technological fields. He now also has a team that helps him.
Morale
Many of Majjan’s latest inventions are hunting related –—Shaikh Hamdan has an interest in hunting, and Majjan adopted that interest as his own. One of the smaller devices is designed to train falcons: a pigeon is placed inside the machine and, when triggered, is thrown up into the air for the falcon to catch. Another machine is dog-shaped, with a cable coming out of the snout. A rabbit is attached at the end and reeled in, training the dog to chase it.
It’s been his modus operandi since he began — see a problem, find a solution. If there is a solution, make a better, more efficient one.
Outside the store, Majjan displays some of the most impressive, and expensive, camping equipment around. There’s a tent that can be attached to the roof of your car, so that you just climb up into it, and it includes a DVR and laptop.
Another tent is in fact a portable bathroom, complete with stainless steel showerhead and modern toilet. “People today get shy [of relieving themselves out in the open]...they get scared of snakes,” says Majjan of where he got the idea, adding that it was something he added to an already existing creation.
But perhaps the coolest thing about Majjan’s creations and the store itself is that everything is solar-powered. When he rented the land to build the store, there was no electricity, and Majjan had made the solar lights outside Cycle Park in Barsha.
Now anything that needs electricity in the store is solar-powered, including his inventions. Majjan also built a traditional-style restaurant outside, which he will open next year, and even that is run entirely on solar energy.
“I’m addicted to inventions,” says Majjan of this all-consuming work. “If I stop I will die, I know.”