Some years ago, a couple of 12-year-olds visited the UAE. Like everyone else, they were awestruck by the beautiful buildings that towered over them. The brightly lit roads, the pristine beaches, the labyrinthine malls — everything appealed to their young hearts. This was a place where they could live — and enjoy every moment of the day. There were no old buildings in sight. Everything sparkled. It was so modern. So new. So much what they would like for their future, with each tower outdoing the other in design and innovation.

“We would rather live here than in our present home,” they decided to the horror of their parents and the amusement of everyone else who heard them. For they had come from Paris — what we like to believe is the city of everyone’s dreams.

In their eyes, however, their home city was too quiet and self-contained — and yes, too old fashioned — for their high spirits and their plans for the years ahead. As for the perceived romance of Paris and the historical significance, they shuddered to think of both. Where would all that history take them, when what they wanted was to leap into the unknown future? True, Paris had some charms with its mostly pleasant weather and the familiarity of the language they knew so well — but then again, it was home ground, they had to go through the entire school year, they had to run errands, they had to make boring trips to single storied shops and supermarkets ... nothing like the malls in Dubai with something for everybody and definitely a lot for children.

The story of the children’s preferences was oft told and mostly laughed over light-heartedly. Imagine comparing Dubai in all its modernity with Paris where everything of note is hundreds — and hundreds — of years old! But when we wandered around Dubai recently, not so long after a short, run-through visit to Paris — where all we could collect were impressions — we suddenly understood what those children meant. Romantic Paris, with its buildings and its boulevards, keeps its past alive. History talks through every wall and window and painting and pillar. You cannot escape it and as you watch the traffic flow past, you see in your mind’s eye, the crowds raging through the streets during the French Revolution or Napoleon’s army marching down the Champs Elysees or the free French forces on parade celebrating the liberation of France after the Second World War.

The bridges of Paris breathe music and art. The buildings of Paris do the same: The Louvre, which is almost three-quarters of a kilometre long, Quasimodo’s Notre Dame with its gargoyles and gutters, the majestic illuminated Eiffel Tower. They may have been created by different architects and in different eras, but each has its own stories ...

There is really no comparison, you think. How can you equate a city with a thousand-year-old history with one that has sprung up — and surpassed so many others — in the last five or six decades?

But, when you look at the brick and cement and glass that rises into the skies in Dubai, where but for a few twin high-rises, no two buildings are identical, you realise that these speak just as loudly to those who are listening as do the edifices in Paris. It could be the World Trade Centre, it could be the Dubai Mall, it could be the pinnacled perfection of the Burj Khalifa or the familiarity of the Burj Al Arab ...

Those glorious structures that dot the landscape from one end to the other of the emirate talk too — and what they say to those who are listening is: ‘This is the future.’

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.