It’s undeniable that our country has progressed tremendously and along with it, nudges her people towards upward mobility. The result we see now is a sizeable Malaysians who belong to the middle class or higher.
Nothing is more evident by the mushrooming of new houses courtesy of various developers in catering to the Malaysian nouveau riche.
But we are now witnessing an alarming trend associated with this positive development.
Allow me to justify, I was born and raised in a place called Kepong. Previously this place was regarded as a less than savoury place in KL, fit for people with dubious backgrounds and secret societies were in abundance. There may be a semblance of truth to this but times have changed and today’s Kepong is no longer its former shadow self.
This change is attributed to the fact that we are experiencing land scarcity in KL due to massive migration of people from other states and the birth of more families. For convenience sake, people do want to live near to the city centre and since other places have no more land for further development, naturally developers eye newer untapped places to fulfil these people’s needs. Kepong benefited from this.
Unfortunately, some highly delusional people embarked on an ambitious plan to house rich people yet were very embarrassed by the painful truth that the very land they wanted to develop is situated in Kepong. That could be solved or so they thought, by building new houses and when completed, eradicated whatever association these projects have with seedy Kepong by conveniently adding the name “Damansara” into the new addresses. Better still, have a new postcode instead of 52100.
Suddenly, Damasara is closer to Kepong than ever before and no, it’s not due to the LDP highway but some deceitful acts. If you ask me, there’s no logic why these latest housing estates are called Damansara instead of Kepong since they are actually nearer to Kepong than Damansara! Maybe, this was done to placate equally delusional home buyers that no, they were not going to buy homes in Kepong. Reality bites; therefore, let us all collectively pull the wool over own eyes.
Ironically, some of these home owners used to live within a stone’s throw away in a place called Kepong and some are involved in illegal businesses. What a joke.
Moving away from Kepong, KL has another up and coming new housing project called, lo and behold, Vivaldi! Why they settled on this name is anyone’s guess. I can only hazard a guess that it invokes a feeling of sophistication. It’s not that this hugely popular Venetian music composer was buried in the very ground the structure is built on and neither will he rise from dead to play The Four Seasons the moment the residents reach home after a long and tiring day. I reckon the person who came up with this name for this housing project was probably bankrupted of ideas.
So, moving onwards, what can we expect? Maybe, as I’m writing this piece, an intelligent housing developer might have decided on another new housing estate and it would be called The Picasso-Mozart-Shakespearean-Da Vinci Garden.
What a mouthful but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.
1 comment:
You have a point about "Damansara", though I sort of felt singled-out since I live in Bandar Sri Damansara...and quite obviously, at the edge of the Damansara-Kepong-Selayang-Sungai Buloh-Shah Alam-Kuala Lumpur-Timbuktu-Lilliput borders.
Whether I live in a place called Bandar Sri Damansara or Bandar Sri Kepong is of no consequence as long as the neighbourhood is nice and peaceful (and the fact that I wasn't the buyer of this house...hmmmm), but I will settle here nonetheless.
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