I intensely love my job as a film programmer and journalist. It allows me to travel the world, constantly meet exciting people from all over. Imagine, I wake up, and I'm in the Madinat Jumeirah Mina A'Salam in Dubai, with the sea right outside my balcony, a swank yacht slicing the blue in the distance. The hotel is so extravagant, that to go from reception to the hotel restaurants, you need to take an abra (traditional boat, but run on batteries here) and glide along its serene canals.

Yes, I'm in Dubai on work. As South Asia Consultant to the Dubai International Film Festival, I do pre-selection of South Asian films for the festival. During the festival, I'm moderator for world cinema, doing Q/As with directors and stars. This year, I will do the Q/As for David Batty's docu My Generation starring Michael Caine (UK), Saudi director Haifaa Al-Mansour's Mary Shelley, Sarmad Masud's My Pure Land (UK), Aktan Arym Kubat's Centaur (Kazakhstan), Azar (Iran), Radiogram (Bulgaria), Anup Singh's Song of Scorpions starring Irrfan Khan, and Dipesh Jain's In The Shadows, starring Manoj Bajpayee. While prepping for the My Generation Q/A with David Batty, on the 60's generation in the UK, I discovered that Michael Caine's mother did jhadu-pota in offices, while his father sold machchi. But he didn't like the smell of fish and wanted to be an actor. When he became a star, he had to beg his mother to stop doing jhadu-pota. She didn't want to, "because she would miss her friends." If the papers find out, my name will be mud, he told her. "It's only when she realised she would hurt me, that I could get her to stop," he said in an interview. This telling, heart-breaking detail made the festival for me.