An Interview with Rami Al Tobgy

Rami Al Tobgy is a writer, entrepreneur, and creator of Project RT, a body of work exploring identity, relationships, responsibility, belief, and the experiences that quietly shape who we become. His perspective has been shaped by living across different countries, years spent building businesses, parenthood, loss, and reinvention. Beyond the Veil is his first published book, an unguarded examination of the choices, relationships, and events that shaped his life, and of the questions that remained long after the events themselves had passed. He lives in Dubai, where he continues to write, create music, and develop the wider work of Project RT.

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Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The title came quite naturally because, in many ways, it reflects what the book is asking throughout. Beyond the Veil is about looking past what is immediately visible, whether that means the version of a person we think we know, the meaning we assign to an event, the stories we tell ourselves, or the things in life that do not offer easy explanations.

Much of the book begins with experiences that appeared to mean one thing at the time and looked very different years later. Some were ordinary, some painful, and some were difficult to explain at all. Writing the book forced me to look beyond the surface of those moments and question what I had believed about them, and sometimes what I had believed about myself.

So, the title was never meant to refer to one particular mystery or idea. It became a way of describing the larger perspective behind the book: that what we first see is rarely the whole story.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

By the time I held the finished copy, I had already spent so long with every part of the book, including creating the cover, that I thought I knew exactly what to expect. I didn’t. There was something strange about seeing years of memories, decisions, relationships, and experiences compressed into an object I could hold in my hands.

What affected me most was not the idea of becoming a published author. It was the distance between the person holding the book and the person who had lived many of the moments inside it. Some of those experiences had once felt enormous, permanent, or impossible to understand. Years later, they had become pages I could finally look at from the outside.

That was probably the moment the book felt real to me in a different way. Something that had lived privately within me for so long had taken a form that could now exist beyond me.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I did not grow up wanting to become a writer, and perhaps unusually for an author, I have never really been a reader. I have never read a book simply because I wanted to read one. Even when I try, I struggle to stay focused for long enough. My mind wanders, I lose where I am, and I can find myself reading the same passage repeatedly without taking it in. Film is completely different. I am a huge movie buff, and that was probably my earliest real relationship with storytelling. I can disappear into a film in a way I never could with a book.

There is an irony in that, because when I was young, teachers would tell my parents that creative writing was one of the things I was particularly good at. I enjoyed creating stories, but I never connected that with the idea of becoming a writer. It was simply something I could do.

Writing seriously came much later, and Beyond the Veil was never supposed to be published. I began writing entirely for myself, almost as a way of putting my life somewhere outside my own head and trying to understand some of what I had lived through. It was much closer to a personal journal than something I imagined strangers would ever see.

That matters because I am an extremely private person. I have never been someone who naturally shares his life with strangers, and until Project RT I did not even have a personal social media presence. So, deciding to publish something as open as Beyond the Veil was a much bigger step for me than simply deciding to release a book.

The direction changed when members of my family began reading what I had written. They kept telling me that it should become a book and that there was something in the story worth sharing beyond our family. I resisted that idea at first, but eventually I began looking at the writing differently. That was when I started shaping, rewriting, and polishing what had begun as something private into Beyond the Veil.

So, there was never a particular writer who inspired me to become one. My influences came much more from film, music, people, and life itself. Writing became another way of trying to understand experience, and only afterwards did it become something I was willing to share.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

Before writing, most of my working life was spent in completely different worlds. I started in entertainment and events, later became involved in hospitality and nightlife, and went on to build and work on businesses in technology and the automotive world. I have always been drawn to creating things from scratch, whether that meant a company, an idea, an event, an app or, eventually, a book.

Something readers may not expect is that writing is only one part of what I do creatively now. Project RT grew out of the same instinct that led me to write Beyond the Veil, but it has since expanded into music, reflections, and other ways of exploring many of the same ideas from different directions.

The bigger contrast is probably that none of this followed a planned path. I never set out to build a career in one field and stay there. I have tended to follow ideas wherever they led me, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Looking back, that constant movement between very different worlds probably shaped Beyond the Veil as much as any single event did. Had my life followed a more predictable path, I am not sure there would ever have been a book to write.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

The most meaningful part was probably discovering that I could create something without measuring its value by what it might earn. For most of my working life, I built businesses and pursued ideas with a clear commercial purpose. Success was naturally tied, at least in part, to whether something could generate a return.

Beyond the Veil was different from the beginning. When I first started writing, it was only for myself, so there was no financial objective attached to it at all. Even after the decision was made to publish it, I had no real idea what it might sell or what I might earn from it. Strangely, that made the experience more meaningful rather than less. For perhaps the first time, the value of something I had created had very little to do with its monetary value.

What mattered was that I had taken decades of experiences, relationships, mistakes, losses, and unresolved thoughts and turned them into something that might mean something to another person. If a reader recognises part of themselves in it, questions something they had always taken for granted, or looks at their own life a little differently afterwards, then creating and sharing Beyond the Veil will have been one of the most meaningful things I have ever made.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

The funny thing is, Beyond the Veil actually does have something of a soundtrack.

Music has always been strongly tied to memory for me. There is even one part of the book where, whenever I read it, I hear Harold Faltermeyer’s Memories in my head. I will leave it at that, because explaining why would give away more than I want to.

Then there is the music that grew out of Project RT itself. Beyond the Veil became the title track connected to the book, created to capture something of its atmosphere beyond the written story. Dear Adam comes from the book I am currently writing, but much of it reflects on the same life and experiences explored in Beyond the Veil, so it naturally sits in the same emotional world.

If I were building a full soundtrack, I would not choose songs simply because their lyrics matched individual scenes. I would choose the music that carries the memories and emotions behind them. For me, that is what a soundtrack really does. Sometimes a few notes can take you somewhere that pages of explanation cannot.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I do not think there is one conclusion I want every reader to reach. In fact, I would probably be disappointed if everyone closed the book thinking the same thing. What I hope it does is make people a little less certain about the conclusions they have already formed, whether about another person, an event, themselves, or something they have never been able to explain.

Much of Beyond the Veil is about how differently life can look once enough time has passed. We make decisions with limited information, judge people from what we can see, and often decide what an experience meant before we have lived far enough beyond it to understand its consequences. I hope the book encourages readers to look again, not necessarily to change their minds, but to remain open to the possibility that there may be more to the story.

My perfect reader is not someone who agrees with me. It is someone who is willing to question me, question themselves, and keep reading even when the book takes them somewhere they are not entirely comfortable going. If they finish it with more questions than they began with, I would consider that a good thing.

What creative projects are you currently working on?

I am currently working on Dear Adam, which grew out of many of the ideas that remained with me after writing Beyond the Veil. It is a very different book, but it looks at many of the same parts of life from another direction, including family, friendship, love, fear, pain, money, purpose, faith, and the choices that gradually shape who we become.

Project RT has also expanded beyond books. I have been creating original music connected to the wider body of work, including Beyond the Veil, Dear Adam, and other songs that explore similar themes in a different form. I am also developing another Project RT project that approaches those ideas in a more interactive way, although I would rather not say too much about that until I know exactly what form it will take.

What interests me most now is not keeping each project in a separate box. A book, a song, a reflection, or something more interactive can all approach the same idea differently. Project RT is gradually becoming the place where those different forms meet.

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