-- For much of his adult life, Rami Al Tobgy was comfortable working close to the spotlight, as long as he was not the person standing in it. During his years in events, he could organize major concerts and sit alongside celebrities at press conferences, but would deliberately take a seat at the far end of the table. Later, during his years in hospitality, when the group’s venues won awards, he preferred letting someone else from the team go up to accept them. Now, after publishing an unusually personal memoir under his own name, staying at the edge has become considerably harder.
Al Tobgy has always been intensely private. Creating something has never bothered him; becoming the person everyone is looking at is different. Writing suits him partly for that reason. A page gives him time to walk away from a thought, return to it, question his first reaction and decide what he actually means. That preference for time to process extends beyond writing too, which can make live questions feel very different from having the space to think something through.
An Egyptian raised in Kuwait, Al Tobgy moved alone to the UAE at sixteen to attend university. While studying, he began organizing small events that grew into major concerts before he graduated. His career later moved deeper into nightlife, and by his mid-twenties he had become a managing partner in a hospitality group. He eventually stepped away from operations to focus on raising his son, with other entrepreneurial ventures following years later. But the pattern remained. There was always another project, another goal, another challenge and another version of the future to pursue.
For years, progress meant building something outside himself. Eventually, the question changed. If the titles, achievements, possessions and plans disappeared, what would remain? In one of his Project RT reflections, Al Tobgy described the realization simply: “For years I thought I was building projects. Eventually I realised the project had been building me.” That realization became Project RT, a name that now sits above his books, music and reflections but is rooted in something more personal: the idea that the person himself remains the project.
Even the way Al Tobgy first approached publishing reflected his instinct to stay behind the work. When Beyond the Veil was first submitted for publication, he intended to use a pen name rather than his real one. Only after being advised that a memoir this personal would carry more weight with a real person standing behind it did he reconsider. The book itself had not begun as a commercial project. He started writing privately, trying to understand how apparently disconnected experiences had led him to a particular point in his life. What began as a journal gradually became a memoir, and the journey from those first private pages to publication stretched over more than two years.
The memoir went on to receive positive professional reviews from Readers’ Favorite, Literary Titan, Independent Book Review and Kirkus. For Al Tobgy, the importance was less the praise than the realization that people with no connection to him were finding something in a story he had originally written only for himself. Once he began to believe the story might be worth reading, remaining invisible became difficult to reconcile with wanting people to find it.
Beyond the Veil is difficult to summarize neatly. It begins with childhood during the invasion of Kuwait, including memories of rationed food, stored water and his father waiting for basic provisions. From there, it moves through ambition, friendship, loss, marriage, single fatherhood, business success and failure, serious physical pain, several incidents in which he came frighteningly close to dying, and later experiences that challenged a skepticism he still has not completely surrendered.
Those experiences are among the parts of the memoir he is least willing to simplify. Strangers appeared to know details about his life that, in his view, they had no obvious way of knowing. Spiritual explanations were offered for events he had spent years approaching through conventional ones. Relationships he thought he understood began to look different. Even after writing the story, he stops short of claiming certainty about what actually happened. The unanswered questions remain part of the story.
Near the end of Beyond the Veil, another idea begins to emerge. Al Tobgy wonders whether much of what he had endured may ultimately have been leading back to his son, Adam—whether the mistakes, losses and experiences that shaped him were also shaping the father Adam needed. That thought continues into his next book, Dear Adam. Although written to his son, it was deliberately shaped so another reader could feel as though the words were being spoken directly to them too.
Adam’s role changes again in The Concordance, a literary science-fiction project now in development. This time he is Rami’s co-author. The book brings many of the questions that repeatedly appear across Al Tobgy’s nonfiction and reflections, including identity, perception, choice, meaning and the realities people construct around themselves, into fiction.
Project RT, however, is not confined to books. Music became another form of expression almost unexpectedly, although its place in Al Tobgy’s life goes back much further. Music had long been one of the ways he connected with feelings he could not yet fully understand or articulate. When he was younger, Al Tobgy wrote songs and professionally recorded singles in studios. He never believed he had the singing voice to take those recordings further, and public performance never sat comfortably with his instinct to stay out of the spotlight.
Years later, technology gave him a way back into music without requiring him to become its voice or public face. Al Tobgy writes the lyrics, shapes the sound and structure, and keeps refining the material until the finished track reflects what he intended. Some songs take months.
For Al Tobgy, the medium is secondary to the expression. Sometimes what he is trying to communicate becomes writing. Sometimes it becomes music. That unpredictability has become part of Project RT itself. Al Tobgy can be immersed in one piece of work and pause it because another thought, event or feeling suddenly becomes more immediate. A question may become a reflection. An emotion may become a song. A persistent idea may become a book. He does not know what form the next piece of work will take, and that is part of the point.
For most of his life, Al Tobgy believed progress meant deciding what needed to be built next. Project RT began when he started to consider a different possibility: that through all the successes, failures, relationships, losses, questions and creative work, the thing being built had been him all along.
And for once, he is not trying to predict exactly what comes next.
Contact Info:
Name: Rami Al Tobgy
Email: Send Email
Organization: Project RT
Website: https://projectrt.net/
Release ID: 89203212
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