Comment
Letter from Pulau Tikus
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Comment
Letter from Pulau Tikus |
"Polishing" the Pearl As our interview with Teresa Capol has shown (Issue No 38) tourists come to Penang for the sun and the sea, Penang Hill and hawkers food. They don't come to admire the coloured pavements on Pitt Street or Disneyland shows; nor have they come to admire high rise buildings and imitations of Victorian gates nor lamps and trees wrapped in a puerile cover of electric bulbs. They want to see what they don't have in their own countries: they want to see sea eagles, the Braminy kite, the flying lemur, the flying squirrel, the macaques, the green turtle. The Manhatten project, whose latest victim is the Sneah Boay market -now razed to the ground, must be abandoned. The politicians must wake up from their obsessive dream of the "Manhatten Skyline," the abject imitation of New York. They should concentrate on clean toilets, stopping sewage going into the sea, preserving the green - the Millenium Plaza on the Esplanade is an ugly scar, keep the beaches and the sea clean and safe, and end the balding of Penang hill. They must preserve things like the Weld Quay snair village on the sea, the early immigrant hotels called "lodging houses" which have been overlooked and many besides, steeped in tradition and redolent of historic tales. Over-commercialisation must stop and heritage sites prevented from being turned into cheap shopping malls. Like malacca we should preserve heritage buildings by not entertaining applications for high rise buildings in town - those concerned should take lessons in this regard from Paris, Beijing, Manilla, Lyon, Adelaide and Kyoto. And it would be a good idea surely to have trams running again They would go nicely with the old buildings of George Town. Accidents Those who are regularly on the highway must surely have cursed the buses and lorries speeding past them at more than 110 kph.. 4,000 express buses have ignored 80,000 summonses, some dating back to 1999. Commercial Vehicles Licensing Board chairman Baharum Mohamed told the press that "One prominent bus company alone has 8,994 summons notices issued to almost all its buses." Clearly, with the right connections one can be sure of protection. Remember those bus drivers who were suspended years |
| ago but were restored after
what was believed to have been a bit of string pulling? Accidents will continue
to rise if those concerned will not or are unable to enforce the law And remember the luminous strips on helmets - now forgotten by the police? And now we are told by Universiti Putra Road Safety Research Centre that 17% of accidents in 1996 happen at night, that strips on helmets are not caught by dipped lights of vehicles and that the proper place for them is on the rear number plates. And motor cyclists continue to ride on the highway in dark clothes. A friend tells me that when some Honkies fled to Vancouver, detesting China's taking back Hong Kong, they failed the driving test. Curious, he asked a tester, why? The answer was that they had all failed in "courtesy." "You were the only courteous applicant," the officer remarked. My immodest friend, I am sad to report, claimed that he was special because he was in truth a Penang man. Hmmmm. Penang men? Everybody knows they are as rude on the road as they are in the coffee shop. And I can't help recalling that unhappy day when a bevy of chattering girls pushed me back into the lift before I could get out; that Sunday when a woman dashed across my path, making me jump back to avoid getting my knees broken; nor can I forget the woman at the market who rudely elbowed her way past me to get to a flower stall. Will they get that Canadian driving licence, these representatives of the gentler sex? . The accident rate of 5000 for year 2003 puts this country above the figures for the USA. The police solution is to fine drivers MR300 on the spot. This is typical of this country's thinking. Nobody cares about the law, even a law enforcing agency like the police ignore it. They are sultans, parliament and all PLUS power Not to be outdone by the police PLUS started to fine travellers between toll gates for "inordinate delay" between gates. Yet Malaysian Highway Authority director-general Datuk Dr George George claimed the move by PLUS was legal. "It (PLUS) would not simply take action without adequate basis," he said. "Highway users who feel they have been wrongly fined by PLUS can take legal action." As I've said before, we live in a police state and everyone want s to be policeman of traffic, of morals, of discipline, of punishment. Orang asli We inherited the British aborigines department and its basic concept of the orang asli as exotic animals to be "protected" from the corrosive influence of "civilisation". The colonial Orang Asli Act 1954 continues to preserve the inferior status of original natives who are still governed by village heads appointed by the department. Once the land was theirs but no more - they have no "land titles." And we were shocked to learn that Kg Ampangan, Kuala Woh, a settlement of 18 families only now have an electric supply. And who made that possible? - it was the Finnish embassy who installed a solar system for them. The Dayaks and Kadazans and Muruts are now classified as "bumiputera minorities". And how do they classify the orang asli of Malaya? . |
| Poor youngsters The young don't have a chance. Ex-army men are to be trained to discipline schoolchildren. In the universities, the special branch watches over the students The teachers' union and parents say that soldiers do not have the specialised skills needed to tackle the problem of discipline in schools. The secretary-general of the National Union of the Teaching Profession points out that 'Disciplining soldiers and schoolchildren are two very different things.' All this has come about, we are told, because a student was beaten to death and because of the rise of secret societies. Now everybody knows the problem of gangsterism in the MCA and in UMNO. Parents are involved. And who will discipline the parents? Full marks petrol station If you are in Butterworth on the highway going east, Petronas service station's store, run by Zimaff Enterprise, is a pkeasure to visit. A very clean place servcing warm as well as cold things to eat it deserves top marks for cleanliness. What is remarkable is the well-maintained wcs. On one of our visits we even saw bundles of lfowers in the gents. If only Penang state was as clean as that! # K L Chai |
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| ______ INDEX Point to the article that you want to read, and CLICK Index page The Baling meeting Book review Food guide The god in the garden Grandma's garden Letter from Pulau Tikus Malay words from Chinese The mistress of ceremonies
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_____________________ The Penang File Issue 39 |