Malaysia - Paradise lost

Malaysia's 50th year of independence looms ahead, and with it, the Visit Malaysia Year 2007. While many may look forward to next year as a spearhead to boost Malaysia's tourism, I find myself looking more cynically upon it. For the paradox is, even as we paint a beautiful front of our country as a tourist's paradise, we need only to look in the backdrop - and at ourselves - to see that whatever that is left of Malaysia's true beauty, is falling apart. I have not the faintest clue what we are so darn proud about.

We pride ourselves as a bastion of cultural heritage and historical enclaves, yet every year, dozens of historic buildings in the inner cities and towns are being torn down in the name of development. We claim to have one of the largest rainforests in the world, yet we read countless reports in the newspapers about the destruction of Belum Forest. We spend money constructing hideous plastic flowers to adorn our streets and highways, instead of spending the resource to plant real flowers.

The worst part about it is the pathetic combination of short-sightedness and apathy that those in power have to stop the festering before it eats up whatever that is left of what is truly beautiful about Malaysia. The threat of encroaching development to PJ district's beloved Gasing Hill makes the headlines for a few days; but after the bravado is over, another few hundreds of trees are quietly felled. We talk so much about saving our rivers, and yet every day I see selfish and uncivilised scumbags nonchalantly dumping their non-biodegradable trash into the drains. We are truly a society which is not yet ready to embrace this technology we call plastic.

To my fellow Malaysians, I send out this sombre message: Stop fooling ourselves. We are losing all those things that really make Malaysia unique. Let us stop deluding ourselves into believing that visitors from abroad would rather see the Twin Towers than historic Chinatown; that they would rather soak in the air-conditioned air in our one-too-many shopping malls than breathing in the fresh air in what's left of our forests; that they would rather view Klang Valley from the top of the KL Tower, than to view the land of Borneo from the summit of our very own Mount Kinabalu.

In our blind quest for materialism, our narrow-mindedness will not cease until every last tree is felled, every last heritage building is demolished, and every last river is poisoned beyond rescue. And then, only generations later, do we sit up and wonder what the s**t happened.

We are so blind.