before anything else, let me firstly say that i do not claim to be a political pundit nor am particularly interested in the latest political news, scandals, debates, or issues of the day. in general, i think politics is boring and history repeats itself because people are quite selfish and short-sighted by nature and the only time people have reversed the status quo or changed the tide of history has been by going against that instinctive human nature for self-preservation and instant gratification.
secondly, i am not pro-any party or any particular one person. the only things i am 'pro-' are pro-clean and fair elections, and pro-transparency in government, regardless of party or individual.
like thousands of people living in kl, i take the lrt to work every day. i start my journey at one end of the ampang lrt line, at the sri petaling station, and i get off just one stop short of the very last station all the way at the other end of the line. when i get on the train, it's empty. by the time i get off the train, it's empty too. it's a 5-minute drive from my house to sri petaling, and then from the sentul station, it's an approximately 7-minute brisk walk to my office. in total, if you count the return journey, i spend an average of 90 minutes on a train a day, and 20 minutes walking, which gives me plenty of time to think, reflect, ponder.
when i first started taking the train to the hang tuah station a year ago, to walk to my office on jalan bukit bintang, i thought it'd be a chore. and honestly, some days, it is. when you get on at peak hours and people pack in like sardines. when there seems to be a pregnant woman on every carriage, whom you have to give up your comfortable seat for. when the driver seems to be taking out some suppressed frustration on the train brakes and you're jostled around every time the train stops at another station.
but that was before i discovered the graffiti spray-painted on the crumbling walls of the old pudu jail that i started walking past every day. that was before i walked past those walls one day to find that some guerilla artist had stuck some hipster lomo prints all over them and thought to myself, this pudu jail could actually be marketed as a tourist attraction. that was before my boyfriend told me that the peeling paint depicting an idyllic picture of a tropical, sandy beach on the walls of the pudu jail was actual painted by an inmate during his incarceration at the jail.
that was before i explored the grimy jalan alor a stone's throw away, that always has a very confusing fragrance of sewage and tantalising hawker fare wafting along the street. that was before i walked past the royale bintang and watched tourists from china, america, and the middle east piling into one tour bus after another, or eating breakfast at the hotel restaurant, and imagined what their lives were like back home and what it might be like seeing the city i grew up in with fresh eyes. that was before i discovered that along just one road you can have one of kl's biggest malls, swankiest malls, newest malls, authentic middle eastern restaurants, dodgy massage parlours, hawker stalls, organic restaurants, hair academies, shisha parlours, nightclubs, and gleaming banks and corporate offices.
and that, was before i started driving to the office and getting stuck in hour-long jams. sure, i had my comfortable air-conditioning and a proper stereo playing music in the car, instead of the tinny announcements of each station name coming from the in-dire-need-of-being-replaced speakers on the trains. but after awhile it felt monotonous, boring, sterile. it was the same, day in, day out. when you're on the road, on the train, every day is different. the faces, the shops you walk past - they change every day.
and then our office temporarily relocated to masjid jamek. if i thought walking along bukit bintang was exciting and exotic, masjid jamek was a whole new level. upon exiting the station, i walked into a little bazaar with vendors setting up makeshift stalls to sell all sorts of local snacks and delicacies. and past butchers displaying huge beef carcasses hanging from large metal hooks and grisly cow heads without bodies attached to them and with glazed-over eyes staring blankly at you as you walk past. directly opposite the road is a shiny mcdonalds outlet, where the same meat is packaged in a much more appetizing manner, and people happily chomp away, oblivious to what the cow they're eating looked like before it was turned into ground beef.
i discovered that the famous beef ball noodles that my mum had grown up eating when she was a little girl living around the area was just around the corner. and my knowledge of kl geography increased even more when i discovered that chinatown and the big bookshop i used to love going to as a kid was around another corner.
last week, we moved to sentul. sentul is a little dustier, a little quieter than bukit bintang or masjid jamek, but it has a sleepy charm of its own as well. walking to my office from the station, i walk right through a low-cost housing estate and past wesley methodist school, amid the noisy chatter of schoolchildren relishing their morning rehat from sitting in a dull classroom. there is more greenery around the area, so early in the morning i hear birds chirping from the trees above, blending in with the hum and drone of traffic in the distance.
just as i round the corner to my office, i walk past a kandang housing about 30 cows (and no, i'm not exaggerating) kept by squatters who, rumour has it, believe that the cows are sacred and will protect the hindu temple located right next to it, and as such, refuse to remove the cows. sometimes, there are hens and little chicks and dogs running around as well.
if there's anything i've come to appreciate from all these lrt rides and walking through the city, it's the sense of feeling the heart, the pulse, the rhythm of the city. that is something you don't experience through looking at pictures on a computer screen, or hearing my secondhand account of what it's like to walk past cow dung and shisha parlours and mak ciks selling nasi lemak in just one day, in one city, along one train line.
which brings me to the events of last saturday. i went for many reasons. one, my previous plans were cancelled. two, just because i was banned by parentals from going last year, and since they were not saying anything this year, i wanted to go out of curiosity. three, i didn't want to be one of those malaysians who have lots to comment from whatever photos and footage they've watched on the internet that could be so easily doctored, skewed, and distorted, but who actually couldn't be bothered to be there in person and see for themselves what actually went down. four, i went to be inspired. to be challenged. i wanted to witness firsthand the 'spirit of the rakyat' that seemed to be all so prevalent in bersih 2.0.
i went. i was tear gassed. i ran. i stood / sat in the scorching afternoon sun. i was on that very road and heard the crash of the car as it rammed into sogo. i walked for ages around the city because all the main roads were blocked by police. i waited in long queues at the monorail station because trains were delayed. and i was disappointed. in a lot of things.
disappointed at the 'herd mentality'. disappointed at the people who seemed to want to cause a scene more than protest peacefully. disappointed at how some people seemed intent on provoking the police into aggression. say what you want about agent provocateurs being planted, but those aside, the car crash incident aside, even in the crowd there was plenty of naiveity going around and people who probably thought they were being some sort of heroes by shouting along to political slogans. yes, we get it, nobody likes rosmah, but the point of screaming it out in a public assembly is???
yes, we get it, the local, controlled media plays up things, but nobody takes them too seriously anymore. and the supposedly objective, liberal media? i didn't see much difference in terms of slant, bias, and appeals to emotion rather than logic and objectivity when reporting on bersih 3.0. the only difference in their propaganda was whose agenda they were propagating.
but mostly, i was disappointed by the way people swallowed up the drama wholesale - the way obviously doctored photos were posted and reposted around the web, the way rumours of people dying from the car crash ignited fury before anyone stopped to check their facts. seriously, would you trust someone who can't tell the difference between a normal and obviously photoshopped picture, who wouldn't bother to determine if their news sources are credible or not, to run the country much better than those who are currently running it?
i was disappointed by the way many people just wanted to spectate, rather than participate. it's always easier to criticise, than to actually do something to change things. yes, i have a lot of doubts about what good a rally like this can do, but i wanted to see what it was like for myself, instead of sitting in the comfort of my home and commenting that there's no point in rallying together for one day in a year when the rest of the year people couldn't be bothered to work together.
maybe i'm being too glib, too naive myself. maybe i'm oversimplifying things. but my point is this. good intentions, and even righteous anger and indignation, is not enough. if we talk about the 'spirit of the rakyat', then yes, many people who marched at bersih 3.0 had genuine motives. but having good intentions can do more harm than good if coupled with naiveity and gullibleness. when people react out of emotion, out of the heat of the moment, then when rumours like 'the police killed someone!' or 'a mobster killed a police!' are spread around the wrong camps, things start getting out of hand, very quickly. agent provocateurs need people to provoke in the first place, or they would not succeed.
what i'm saying is this. change doesn't happen overnight. it doesn't happen through force. it happens through persistence. determination. a little at a time. a day at a time. it happens when we stop waiting for one catalysmic event to shake things up and finally bring about a revolution. even revolutions just fade into a few lines in a history book. and then the cycle repeats itself.
no, change, real change, the kind of change we get to feel in our bones and see in our lives, is when we change. when we change our shallow and short-sighted perspectives. when we discipline ourselves to learn to see things through the other person's eyes and realise that maybe we're not so different. maybe we're not so much holier than them. when we learn to forgive. when we plant our feet firmly on the ground, when we stop cocooning ourselves in a bubble of comfort, fed by secondhand information, when we stop pretending to know what other people's lives are like and actually get uncomfortable to find out, that's when we get close to the heart of where the real change happens. it happens in the day-to-day lives of the rakyat who work hard and honestly just to feed their families, and who change what they know they can, in their own small ways.
if there's one thing i'm glad bersih 3.0 did, is that it got a whole bunch of people out of their comfortable saturday routines into that heart of the community. it got people from all races and all walks of lives running along dodgy alleys and into malay bazaars seeking drinks to calm throats parched by the heat and tear gas. it got middle-class people like me feeling that sense of muhibbah when the hawker we bought our milo ais from expressed good-natured concern, warning us to 'berhati-hati' as we went on our way. it got people who would never have a reason to take public transport queueing for ages to get onto a train. it got people from different walks of lives and cultures sitting next to each other, sharing umbrellas, sharing salt, smiling at each other.
the question on my mind, as saturday came to a close, was why does it take malaysians something like bersih to act this way? and then as i thought back to all my train rides and watching different people interact with each other, remembering the way people gave up their seats for the elderly and pregnant, remembering how an old man picked up and returned something i dropped while walking to a train, remembering how two sisters returned my lost passport at the sentul station, it dawned on me.
it doesn't take something like bersih for us to act this way. if anything, the stories of kindness and community and the spirit of muhibbah at bersih get told and spread around because they're linked to such huge political issues, which the media always loves to play up. but this is who we, the rakyat, are. even in a metropolitan city like kl, there is still very much a traditional sense of community, if you're looking in the right places.
and maybe the key phrase is 'looking in the right places'. good things are happening, if we're looking in the right places. change is happening, if we're looking in the right places. people can be good-hearted and genuine, if we're looking in the right places. or maybe it should be 'looking with the right eyes'. because it all starts with us. it starts with taking ownership and not pointing fingers or shifting blame or assuming we would have all the answers if the tables were turned. it starts with not trying to change the whole world, but working to change what i know i can, in my world. it starts with me.
