It’s been a while since I posted about my photography activities and the phone reviews, and what better time than the new year to look back at some of the memories created over the last year.
Here’s a couple of moonshots taken last year with my current phone – the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra that I got back in 2023. I’ve put the 30x zoom versions first followed by the regular wide angle photo to give a sense of the zoom. All were taken during our 2024 summer trip to Kashmir (first set in Phalagam, second in Srinagar on the Dal Lake).
It’s been exactly 2 years since I joined my regional role in Boehringer Ingelheim in Dubai. I rarely blog about my personal life, but I thought now would be a good time to share some of the experiences around this move.
The move to Dubai was in itself fairly straight forward as it was through an internal move. I started off with a regular employment based residence visa valid for 2 years. My family also relocated in the middle of last year, and their visas were completed through the office pretty quickly.
Since my visa was due for renewal this year, I decided to opt for the UAE Golden Visa for salaried professionals which has a relatively easier qualification qualification criteria than the others:
Monthly gross salary of AED 30,000 or higher (that seems to be the current consensus, as I have also read of it being the basic salary without allowances in the past)
Bachelor’s degree or higher
Getting the equivalency certificate for this is typically the most time consuming process
While my application was managed by my office in DIFC which definitely helped with the clarity around the process, I did find this recent Reddit post by the Amer Centre quite helpful and along with this article in Khaleej Times that explains the process and documentation requirements. I am sharing a simple guide to get the necessary documents ready based on my experience.
Step by step guide
The overall process took about 2 months for me, out of which the first 3 weeks went in getting the degree equivalency certificate, followed by 2 weeks for the degree physical attestation and about 2 weeks for the actual visa application, health checkup & Emirates ID issuance.
You need digitized versions of the following key documents for the application (some like the equivalency certificate require additional documents for the verification) in addition to other documents from your employer:
Degree equivalency certificate
Bank statement showing the salary credit each month
Attested degree certificate (UAE Embassy in university country and MOFA in UAE)
NOC from company
Current passport and visa
Current passport sized photo (white background, no glasses – you can tell the photo studio for the Emirates ID or visa version)
The equivalency certificate
Getting the degree equivalency certificate is usually the bottleneck in this process, based on the experience of my colleagues and those who have shared their experience online.
The process is as below with details on the Ministry site here (they also have a useful document checklist that you can refer to):
Typically you would need your original degree certificate, the final transcript (official stamped marksheet for the entire duration of the course) and your passport copy. You need to choose one of the official partners (Dataflow or Quadrabay at the moment) for the verification and share these documents with them. It costs around AED 350 for this part of the process.
The turnaround time is slated to be 30 days, but is completely dependent on the response time of the university. Here are a couple of tips to help speed up the process which worked for me:
Keep the details of your university alumni association and key academic departments handy.
Once the initial documents have been verified by the partner and sent to the university, if you do not get any update within a couple of weeks check in with the customer support for details regarding the communication with the university.
I managed to get the details of the email subject line and the department to which they had mailed this way.
Contact the alumni association or academic department with the details you got regarding the verification communication to nudge it along.
Once the verification process is successfully completed, you will get the notification to complete the application on the Ministry site with the appropriate link. There is another payment involved, and the certificate is generated almost immediately. This completes the most time consuming part of the application.
Degree attestation and next steps
The next few steps are quite straight forward, and you could even get the degree attestation done while you are waiting for the verification to happen. You will of course need the physical degree certificate for this, and use an agency like VFS (they have an attestation helpline that you can mail here) to get this done in 2-3 weeks with doorstep pickup and drop-off.
Once you have these documents you can go ahead with the actual visa application. A few additional tips:
In the bank statement (an online statement download should be fine), highlight the salary deposits and make sure that your name & account details are there on every page & highlight those as well.
If you are immediately transferring your salary to another account after the deposit, you may need to provide the statement from the other account as well.
The photo you submit will be used in the visa and Emirates ID, so you can ask the photo studio to take it accordingly.
You will probably be given a slot for the health checkup, but depending on your location you may be able to walk in for the checkup much earlier.
Ensure that you are setup on UAE pass so that the authentication on the partner sites is easier.
Setup your ICP app as well do that you can access the digital versions of your visa and updated Emirates ID. This uses UAE pass as well for login.
Depending on how you have applied, you may need to get the new Emirates ID re-issued.
You will need to transfer your dependents’ visas at some point in time as well.
Hope this helped you, and wish you the best with your Golden Visa application! If this gets a good response, I’ll share some of my experiences and learnings around the Dubai relocation.
I have been using the kali peeli service of Ola Cabs since it was launched last year, and the experience had been quite good leading up to January this year. However, the last few weeks have been pretty bad:
There have been instances where the booking gets accepted by a driver, only to be cancelled in a few seconds\minutes. This can be especially problematic if you’ve exited the application as there is no notification.
Many a times the drivers accept and even call up confirming they’ll arrive in a few minutes. However, on checking the app after those few minutes have elapsed show the trip completion page with the rating option. I promptly leave a 1 star rating of course.
I even found a guy with 2 mobiles, and he pretty much logged out of one and logged in through the other as I got into the cab.
I’ve been through up to 6 attempts at trying to book a kali peeli before giving up on some days. All this makes me wonder whether the kali peeli experiment is drawing to a close. Based on my conversations with the some of the drivers over the last few months (some of who wondered why Ola was paying them), the kali peeli option seems to have been a marketing and potentially recruitment exercise by Ola. It was good while it lasted I guess.
An observation on the non kali peeli side of things
I’ve also used the regular Ola service (mostly mini) over this period too, and discovered a loophole in the prepaid wallet which possibly applies to other services like Uber and Meru as well. The way I discovered it was also pretty interesting.
I had availed the 100% cashback wallet topup offer and booked an Ola mini for a return trip from an event in Vashi. I had spoken to the driver a couple of times to provide him with directions as usual, and he confirmed that he had reached. I got in the elevator with my family, and stopped at one of the floors on the way down where an elderly gentle man tried to get in with his suitcase, but the lift doors wouldn’t close. So he got off and set down the stairs. The doors didn’t close even then, and we ended up taking the stairs as well. As we made our way to the gate where the cab was waiting, I called him and as we exited the gate, we found the cab pushing off in the opposite direction though I had told him to come towards the gate.
I called the driver again and he told me that someone had already boarded the cab and told him that he was one of our friends who had to go to the airport and he’d also booked a cab for the airport. After a lot of heated arguments between the driver, the so called “friend” and me, it finally emerged that it was the same elderly gentleman who’d caused us to climb down the stairs, taken off with our cab and refused to get off. Luckily the driver managed to get him off before they went to a long way and returned to take us.
Since Ola is metered completely on the mobile with no intermediate readings, it was impossible to reset the meter (at least the driver and I didn’t know how), and the entire amount ended up getting deducted from my wallet. The saving grace was that it was possibly only a km or so extra, and I offset some of it from the toll payment made by the driver in cash.
Now, think of a situation where Ola recruits the unscrupulous kali peeli drivers who’ve been exploiting the system as I noted earlier, and they take joy rides with your Ola money. Not very pretty, is it? I’m sure they’ve built in some measures to guard against this kind of behaviour.
