Focus Focus: Sayangi Lumpur Kita

Not long ago I noticed a sudden burst in the construction of those huge, god-awful obtrusive billboards all over our fair city (PJ is not the only city afflicted by this consumerist disease), with cheap placement advertisements gently reminding its denizens to “Love Kuala Lumpur.” While the erection of these billboards is nothing new in our concrete urban playground, the gently castigating reminders were.

Do we not love this city enough as it is? Has the fair maiden of the muddy estuary felt abandoned by her co-habitants such that she has acquired the sincere services of the civil servants to enlighten the populace about her plight? And, purely out of curiosity, how would one gauge the quantity of this “love” for Kuala Lumpur, assuming the ads had been placed to induce such a positive differential?

Let us proceed with the arguments set forth in the above by first attempting to define the topic at hand: what is Kuala Lumpur?

Geographically it’s a landmass of nearly 250 square km within the state of Selangor, its centre located at the meeting point of the flood-prone Klang and Gombak rivers. The city first prospered because of tin mining, before becoming an administrative centre, eventually becoming the nation’s political and economic capital. With a population of almost two million, it continues enjoys the status of “fun- and festive-prone capital of Malaysia.”

But what does such a definition really mean? What does KL mean to us? Or, from another angle, what would run through our heads if KL were taken away from us?

Thus, with such crude, open-ended and rudimentary allusions as to what constitutes this city, we proceed.

What do the billboards mean when they say “Love Thy City” (an emotional carte blanche, surely)? Because the city is so large (entire kampungs exist within it), one would suppose that with such a blanket request one can do little but love it all, and with equal measure too—Bangsar as equally as Chow Kit, Taman Tun Dr Ismail as equally as Cheras, Pudu as equally as Bukit Tunku, ad infinitum.

But that serves only to look at the city spatially. As I’ve posited above, KL is more than the sum of its physical parts. To love the city wholly is to embrace the experience of the city in its totality, to accept and cherish the good things about the city along with the bad: her broadband and Wi-Fi along with her shoddy and sluggish Internet service; her extensive network of highways along with extortionist toll rates and traffic jams; those after-the-fact corruption trials of Kasitah Gaddam and Eric Chia along with the lacklustre “we will not extend his contract” statement made about the corrupt Anti Corruption Agency director general; ad nauseum.

Well, love is (or should be) blind, as the adage goes. But can we afford to be?

To love someone or something does not automatically place that person or thing beyond reproach, criticism and necessary remedial action. Let’s face it. Nothing’s perfect. And for many of us, KL is far from nothing—oh, allow me my indulgences!

In other words, to be able to love is also to be able to change.

Hence, this message is also telling us tacitly that there are ways to love this city (as legitimised by Putrajaya). But should those who possess the faculties to say “this is the way to love this city” should also be allowed to say “no, you cannot love it like that.” As such, graffiti tagging is disallowed but visually intrusive billboards are encouraged, defending Kampung Berembang from bulldozers is frowned upon but sending in RELA and FRU to help evict the uncompensated kampung folk is “for the good of one and all.” Where is the line?

Truth be told, “theirs” isn’t the only way to love, as the communists of yore (for right or for wrong) proved to Malaya. For us living in Malaysia today, there may not be need to engage in militant attitudes, since our contemporary context has changed. We need only to make a constant clamorous yet intelligible din so that those in power know how much we love this land—and hopefully see that love being translated into action. If respond to this din they do not, help make change possible in the next general elections.

Unless, like in Machap, ‘ol Samy decides to sing the blues.

TEXT Fahmi Fadzil IMAGE Bright Lights At Midnight