Oil is my shadow. It’s what my parents and half of the educated Iranians of the 20th century studied in university. It’s why they settled in Texas, which boasts one of the best Petroleum Engineering Departments in the US at the University of Texas, Austin. It’s what fuels the economy of my current home, Russia.

Today, “oil” and “ industry” are dirty words, whose threat grows exponentially the nearer they are to one another. Not only are they considered dirty literally, but they also commit that most heinous of crimes in today’s amnesic climate: they recall the “past” (gasp). Cities who see themselves as “modern” have only a historical relationship to industry and at best a dismissive, albeit disingenuous, left-leaning relationship to oil.

Not Baku. With its past, present, and future tenses firmly hinged to petrol, Baku makes industry and its urban position not merely relevant but radically so. The central promenade along the Caspian features an oil well covered in Christmas lights, showing the temperature and time of day. The dusty wells of Bibi-Heibat stand forlornly, a stone’s throw from downtown Baku, as a reminder of the fluctuating prices not to mention livelihoods of entire populations. And perhaps the strangest spot in Baku: Yanar Dagh, a mountain that’s been on fire without interruption for more than a thousand years, thanks to the natural gas seeping from its surface.

“Pumpjacks of the World Unite!” could be the city’s motto. Today, with oil prices hovering well above the legendary $100/ barrel mark, Baku is bustling again. The windfall has given the city a face-lift, and not to be outdone, the lumberjacks respond in kind as the city teems with construction

sites for new buildings. If London and New York are turning green, Baku is still opting for the security, elegance, and stability only black can offer.

Black doesn’t go out of fashion, for this is no isolated or recent phenomenon: in the early 20th century, Baku was producing half of the world’s oil supply. Mansions were built by the likes of the Rothchilds and the Nobels, whose peeing contests consisted not only of whose house was larger but more importantly, whose tanker fleet was (answer: nobel).

Today, the independence of the country shapes the boom in hard and soft ways. Where it once fueled the Soviet Army against the Nazis, it now finances a cottage industry of content intended to flesh out a fragile Azerbaijani identity. An interesting exercise given that, before 1991, Azerbaijan as such never existed save for a short 23-month span around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. What the West does with Helmut Newton or Muhammad Ali (make coffee table books that compete with the size of the coffee table), Azerbaijan does with Heydar Aliyev, the former president and father of the current president. An A2-sized hardback shows full-bleed images of the Aliyevs with the Clintons, Arafat, and at various functions. But in the Icheri Sheher or Old Town – a relatively well-preserved oasis from the concrete crunch of the city – I stumble across a real find: the complete volumes of Mollah Nasreddin, early Azeri political satire first published in Tbilisi, then Tabriz, then Baku between 1906 and 1931. Within the pages of the weekly rag, young Azeri identity was debated with no shortage of polemics about language, sexism, and religion. Advocating amongst other things the Latinization of Azeri, Mollah Nasreddin poked fun at the country’s fragile position, club-sandwiched between Russia to the north and Iran to the south. Communism no longer threatens Azerbaijan from the north and the Azeris seem rather immune to the creeping fundamentalism besetting its Caucasian neighbors. Pipeline politics have cemented Baku’s reputation not only as the jewel of the Caspian, but also as the Capital of Caucasian Cultural Exceptionalism. Our hands are clean and on the right side of history: my family has never worked in the oil business. Regardless, wherever goes oil, so go I …