Some traditions never change

And they shoulnd't. At the Al Shahaniya camel race track, about 40km from Doha. That isn't a race going on. The camels are just being taken round and round the track, over and over, for hours, just so that they get a feel of it.

Every country, every different part of this world has its own unique, sometimes weird, traditions. Sometimes, with changing generations, the traditions fade out and become meer memories on a few pages - sometimes fond, sometimes quite forgettable.

Like in India, a tradition that the wife must consider her husband greater than God Himself and take whatever shit he might give her is fast changing. Obviously, like many other 'traditions' - no sex before marriage, arranged marriages etc etc.

Culture changes with time. It's inevitable, in most cases. Today in India, you'll find a number of men being put off because a girl's still a virgin at, forget 28 or 29, in fact 22, or 21, or 20, or 19 for that matter. I am one of those men. A number of women prefer to live-in with their guys rather than getting hitched, thinking how troublesome it's gonna be to split up if they wanted to - divorce papers, court, blah.

I won't get into the subject of women in Qatar at the moment. There might be a few traditions attached to the relationship of a man and woman in this region, but it's foolish to talk about a topic that's been done to death. The point is, things aren't going to change overnight. So let's drop it for the time being.

I'm talking about another tradition in the Middle East. Camel Racing. It's a far more positive tradition, which kicked off in Qatar in 1972. It's still alive. For how long? You can't really say.

When I first landed in Qatar, the thing that I read in a number of get to know Qatar books was while driving on the highway, be careful, there could be a camel crossing the road. Not that it would hurt the camel. You'd be the one dead. It's like smashing your car into a wall.

But it isn't like you'd see camels jogging around Doha. They're mostly in the really remote areas of Qatar, where a little bit of the country's innocence is still alive, geographically speaking.

Last week, I was on my way to Al Shahaniya to interview a Qatari, who has his own private zoo. Al Shahaniya is where the camel races happen.

I had to stop over to see. Maybe not the race, but just stand there beside the tracks, and imagine a huge roaring crowd cheering, the dust, the cars, the men dressed in the traditional robes smoking sheesha.

I could imagine it.

Until last year, the camel jockeys were kids, as young as 10, 11 or 12, or 13, 14 at the max. All over the Middle East, not just Qatar. And these weren't Qatari kids. No way.

These kids were trafficked from countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan. Traffickers would pay impoverished parents a small sum of money, or either simply kidnap the kids and sell them off here.

Why kids? It's fairly simple. Camel racing was a tradition. Not the rich Arabs' ambition. Unlike horse jockeys, who work hard to maintain their weight of no more than 45 kgs, no one wanted to work hard to work out and train and diet.

So having kids as jockeys was a simple solution to keep the tradition alive. Many children were fed only two biscuits and a glass of water a day to prevent them from gaining weight. Others were forced to wear metal helmets in the scorching heat of the desert so they bleed through their noses and lose weight that way.

Things like these forced several Human Rights to raise alarm, and scream "exploitation".

But would that mean Qatar would stop camel races? No way. Not yet. Last year Qatar banned the use of child jockeys, and instead invented remote controlled robots to ride the camels.

A file picture of a race in progress. Atop the camels are remote controlled robots, to direct the animals.

It was the perfect solution.

Qatar is a very focussed country. It's not going to budge. Whether it means flooding the world with money to turn Doha into a world-class city, with independent pubs, nightclubs and highrises or man-made islands, or buying sportsmen from across the globe to get goldmedlas in the 2006 Asian Games, or keeping some traditions alive... outside the city limits of Doha. It's not going to stop now, with anything.

They know, there's a way around everything. They know they got the cash, they can, and will, buy the brains.