KL Lite

"KL has no soul" my sister says. This is probably why she's living in Jakarta right now. KL seems to be entrenched in this herd mentality. It doesn't know what it likes, so it only follows trends. Seorang suka Mawi, semua suka Mawi. Seorang pakai tudung pin kat kepala, semua pakai tudung pin kat kepala. Seorang ada blog, bukak fotopage, download lagu Indon, semua follow suit. It's all about trends in KL, fickle and fleeting. We are all following others round and round in a ring, too fast to even recognize exactly who it is we are following, who is doing the leading?

KL is like my eight year old niece. She doesn't know who she is yet, so she adopts personalities from the Disney channel and Cartoon Network. She asks a lot of questions and is curious of life in a healthy, sometimes annoying, way but is not yet mature enough to be introspective and ask questions of herself. She is eager to please the people she adores, dismissive of those she doesn't want to be friends with. The difference between KL and my niece is that she will eventually grow up, develop her own sense of self and identity, discard whatever is false from whatever she has decided will be her outlook on life and hopefully, be a little bit less annoying. KL, however, looks to be stuck in its pre-adolescent years, eventhough its IC claims it to be forty nine.

What exactly is your identity, Kuala Lumpur? I feel like the people in your city is in pursuit of money and symbol, Razors and iPods, Merces and MyVis, the 300 thousand ringgit house, the datukship and datinship (via marriage). What stands out when you introduce yourself to the world? Two tall buildings, a race circuit, an airport. Glass and asphalt. That is all we have to offer.

We don't know who we are, we've been adopting personalities from our colonizers for ages, still unable to shake them off, unable to form one of our own. We claim we're rich in tradition and culture, budaya Melayu berbudi bahasa but we reserve those for tourists and sastera scholars. We are eight year olds, eager to please those we adore, and we seem to only adore people with money, fame and political clout. We are eight year olds, insecure and immature, copying and embracing whatever we think would get us into the cool cliques- the Guiness Book of Records, any international news media.

Life in KL whizzes by me and all I saw were byproducts and regurgitations of whatever's on MTV, HitzTV and the V channel. Who are you people, really?