It was a nightmare when I recently visited Sentul, where I was born over six decades ago.
Here was a great community of Malays, Chinese and Indians who lived together. Well-connected neighbouring kampongs thrived in a symbiosis of rich cultures, traditions and religions amid a little township with sufficient amenities and sprawling greenery.
Within minutes from busy Chow Kit and bordering the vast, rich fruit groves of Kampung Chubadak and the long stretches of tin mining land up to Setapak, Sentul was a rich paradise even up to forty years ago.
It had renowned schools like the Sentul Convent, the La Salle School and the Methodist Boys School including Tamil, Chinese and agama (religious) schools.
The town also had an integral farming village with cows, goats and sprawling vegetable farms on the ex-mining land.
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Today, the once lush coconut plantations, rubber trees and streams where fish thrived are nowhere to be seen. Also gone are the favourite Malaysian pucuk paku vegetable (fiddlehead ferns) and moringa trees.
Sentul had its fair share of gang fights up to the late 1960s. But roadside thefts and house break-ins were unheard of.
Today, what remains of Sentul is a painful story of a failed, disjointed development plan.
Robbed by greed, Sentul now appears like a jigsaw puzzle of completely incoherent images with congested flats, secretly shared out upmarket condominium development plots and roads that cut across and criss-cross haphazardly.
Sentul and Sentul Pasar’s rich cultural and environmental identity is in tatters. Period.
Gone too are the wonderful fruit orchards that once raged all over Kampung Chubadak. Durians, mangosteens and flaming red and dazzling yellow rambutans are nowhere to be seen today.
The seasonal smells of exotic fruits like langsat, duku, nangka (jackfruit), chempedak (the smaller cousin of the jackfruit) and a whole range of Malaysian fruits just gradually disappeared over the decades.
It seemed like a grand plan to transform this historical and well-knit huge village in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.
Sentul once had huge tourism potential and could have been a holiday getaway for city dwellers. I wonder what it would look like in the decades ahead. Perhaps it is not difficult to guess.
Thanks to our politicians who have turned Sentul into a nightmare of socio-environmental disorder – perhaps for good.
In this modern era, IT and digital tools are helping many governments in the developed worlds to save sprawling residential hubs that have a rich, colourful, historical past.
Such suburbs are becoming world class, community-driven life-sustaining social habitats. They attract droves of tourists to live and savour life in these well-groomed townships.
With nature restored and brimming, these governments have restored the original identities of such villages and townships that offer its inhabitants and visitors a rich encounter with local heritage.
But what have we done to Sentul today? It is sinfully scarred and sacrificed at the altar of ‘development’, its legacy all but sunken. It makes you wonder how many more such villages and townships in the country have had their heritage eroded in the name of ‘development’?
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
Sentul pasar, a close knitted Neighbourhood of yesteryears, my childhood days was full of fun, good friends and plenty of healthy alternative of fresh fruits from Kg. Chumpedak. Today it has been raped in the name of development. The days when the Neighbour played mother and fed you when mother was out on errands . Now, Sentul Pasar remains by name only.
My thoughts exactly… Been watching horrified as scores of trees were mercilessly and brutally sacrificed to replace these horizon- scarring- skyscrapers. Now what we have are sad stumps of trees alongside concrete roadsides that reflect her once glorious past!
The writer has expressed the sentiments of the older generation where past has little or no value for present generation be they leaders or businesses [who may be greedy and more interested in accumulating wealth knowing well that nothing goes along when returning to Maker] while ordinary citizens have little interest as busy with having enough earnings to satisfy basic daily needs for survival.
In the process even the elderly including parents may be neglected or abandonded by some in the persuit of material luxuries and destroying Almighty’s free gifts and some of which there are high costs like water and now oxygine..
Bless all