MY home is a 9th-floor condo, one of a few hundred in a couple of blocks at the foot of Bukit Gasing.

It’s a great comfort, at the fresh start of a day and the smouldering sunset end of one, to look out on a slope of tangled green, with frequent fleeting flashes of yellow-breasted orioles with their orange beaks. In the past couple of years or so, there has been growing unease. Most visibly so is an extension to the temple at the top of the hill. This right-to-theedge edifice spawned the usual inevitable tear in the green growth of the hillside, a muddy gash that was initially dealt with by spreading a few plastic sheets, a laughable defence. ‘Rain’ is an inadequate word to encompass the deluge that Malaysian clouds discharge as a matter of course many afternoons. And we are not talking yet of storms. So they turfed the exposed slope under the building, but the stripping kept spreading downwards, so turfing and strengthening had to follow, this time with the addition of a drain. There was talk that this illegal structure would come down, but after the Hindraf expressions of disaffection and the spanking of the previous State government at the polls, I cannot see anyone brave enough to say the seat of God should be removed to a more secure platform. Not visible, but it’s there too, on top of the hill – a reservoir of millions of litres of water. All I can do is hope the contractor who built it was not the same contractor who put up that research facility in Belum that got dunked into the lake or the school hall whose roof came down. Otherwise, we may get ministers solemnly regretting an Act of God. (About the Belum incident, I always thought it was so far-sighted of the authorities to build something that was reportedly unused for the few years before it took a dive. Imagine the tragedy if the building had been in use.) On the near horizon is a developer who wants to eat away at Bukit Gasing on the KL side. There is a case in the courts on that – a group of residents ganging up against City Hall and the developer. When the Draft Kuala Lumpur City Plan 2020 was released, controversial demarcations and land alienation were justified by the mayor wanting to provoke a response from supposedly apathetic residents. Well, this is one civil servant who is doing a damn good job of arousing the people he governs – sorry, wrong verb, the people he works for. Let’s not make too much of the mayor just coming back from a 12-day study tour of three cities, Berlin, London and Vancouver. The trip may have been planned long before ministers were told to holiday in the neighbourhood and to cut back on their entertainment by 10 per cent. The latest provocation is to withhold the third volume of the draft plan on the grounds that, to quote Puan Zainab, the town and country planning director, “the last thing we want is for the public to be confused.” The first two volumes had created a stir. We don’t need more hullabaloo. Let’s talk outline first before we go into details, she says. Yes, but it begs the question of how people can object to a general outline when they do not know how it will be translated into the actual transformation of the city. People cannot be faulted for being suspicious when City Hall has demonstrated a slippery grasp of outlines and guidelines. Example: one of the Total Planning and Development Guidelines set by the Town and Country Planning Department of the Housing and Local Government Ministry, is that housing development should not take place on slopes exceeding 25 degrees. So what about the Damansara 21 project and its excessive gradient? Is City Hall an independent fiefdom? And will developers please stop referring to Hong Kong? Its outcrops are largely granite. ‘Granitic’ is an adjective describing anything hard. Many of the outcrops in the Klang Valley are shale and sandstone based. ‘Sandstone’ – its insubstantiality is in the composition of the word itself. I await what new provocation the mayor has learned from his studies in Europe and Canada. ● Thor Kah Hoong is a chauvinist and prefers women, not civil servants, to be provocative.

Source: Malay Mail – June 17, 2008