Here be dragons

 

As published in Off the Edge              

 

Anyone who has visited the older parts of Indonesia’s sprawling capital will probably have seen the historical Stasiun Jakarta Kota and noticed the striking difference between it and its Malaysian cousin, the Stesen Keretapi Kuala Lumpur.

 

Architecturally, Stasiun Jakarta Kota is remarkably uncomplicated compared to the splendour of the Kuala Lumpur station. Another obvious difference between the two is that the one in Jakarta is still very much alive with human activity (and waste) while the one in Kuala Lumpur is, well, quite dead.

 

But things were not always sepi at the Kuala Lumpur station. It was the main railway station linking the capital to the rest of the country from the early 1900s up until it surrendered most of its operations to the new Kuala Lumpur Sentral in 2001.

 

Today, other than to photograph its pretty exterior, the station is a dull place to visit.

There is an art gallery/mini-museum—established perhaps to snare the occasional pedestrian—but this also seems somewhat half-hearted. The gallery-museum is, at the very most, uninspiring except for one particular exhibit: A huge model of the original Sentul railway depot and workshop area.

 

Those of us who know Sentul only for its roti canai and the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) might wonder, “Where the heck in Sentul is this? It’s is enormous!” A lot of it has given way to development, and all that is left is guarded behind walls. The famous KLPac building was in fact part of the facility, functioning as a saw mill for our railway lines.

 

Better known today as the Sentul Workshop, the facility has been the heart of our nation’s railway industry. It began operations in 1905 as the central workshop and depot for the Federated Malay States Railway (FMSR), which eventually evolved into the present day Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad (KTMB).

 

Until recently, the Sentul Workshop was home to generations of railway families who depended on employment at the facility. It was a huge establishment of 13 acres, and a busy one considering it was where trains were built, fixed and refurbished before they proceeded to serve commuters and businesses on the Malayan peninsular. It brought life to Kuala Lumpur, and to it Sentul owes its epithet: City of Locomotives.

 

Most of us are unaware of the facility’s significance. The very compound into which some of Kuala Lumpur’s middle-class waltzes for their dose of music and plays, was itself once a great war theatre. In 1944, the facility was destroyed by bombs dropped by the very people who helped build it—the British.

 

So vital was the function of the Sentul Workshop that Allied forces deemed it necessary to destroy the Workshop in order to paralyse the Japanese military occupation during the Second World War. Soon after the bombing, and after looting more than 5,000 locomotive carriages from the peninsula (they ended up in Indochina), the Japanese mission to create an “Asia for Asians” ended too. So, back came the British as we restored the Sentul Workshop to its important position in the Malayan railway industry.

 

The Sentul Workshop history is an important one, and likely to be forgotten. Like the Kuala Lumpur station the Sentul Workshop will also cease its operations when the new facility in Perak is completed, and the land on which it stands has been sold to a new owner.

 

But what will become of it? Will it serve as another community centre like the KLPac? Or will it stand in a grand lull, like Stesen Kuala Lumpur? Perhaps it will be “Bok House-ed” and replaced by a Disneyland of condominiums.

 

Whatever its fate, a group of young photographers feel its visual memory should at least be preserved. With permission from KTMB, photographer K. Azril Ismail and his students from the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) were able to photograph the last vestiges of the original Sentul Workshop.

 

Together with the KLPac, they are staging an exhibition in January to share a glimpse of the historic facility with the public.

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* Iron Dragons of Malaya on their official website.

 

stupid non-resident aliens

 

unmanned toll booths! students from Third World countries will definitely try to pull a fast one on them. they already have. we saw them throwing their worthless coins into the toll bin when we were giving out Mormon literature to fast moving traffic. f*cking brown Asians. cheats. always trying a back-door bargain on the First Worlders. stupid f*cks. the First World invented cheating. remember the Portuguese? the Brits? the French? the Spaniards? these guys here are descendants of those Empirates. you think they’ll let you cheat them back? you’d be stupid to think that. the f*cking toll bins are cheat-proof, b*stards. get over it. put your aluminium coins back into your cheap velcro wallets and ~ sichyoassdown.

 

en la raíz de cada problema es los ingleses

or at least that’s how the joke goes. it’s not funny really, more like a ~ fact.

so here it comes. propaganda in full swing. watch out everybody, we’re independent and full of ethnocentrism! we’re the best model society, with each ethnic group within our borders better than the other. sure, it’s a bit schizo but we’re ~ the best! just you wait! we’ll show you!

but you have to give us a minute first to brag amongst ourselves about how far we’ve come and how we’re cosmetically more advanced than we’ve ever been. and then give us some time to pat each other’s backs for not slicing each other’s throats this past one year. give us a moment to return home and pray, for we are good religious people, that we stay patient till next year and not cut each other’s throats. this is because mass murder gets in the way of making money. nothing should get in the way of making money! money, money, money!!! money buys everything here! and it makes us happy! we want lots of money, and then more!

only then will we sacrifice our capacity of reason to explain how we arrived at where we are today: a superficial, hypocritical, corrupt and vain society.we’re inclined to talk about the Portuguese. but nah … it really was the British.

what?! no hells way was this our own doing! damn you! it was the British!

that man, the interesting one

they all hate him. he speaks to himself in a language only half understood. but i understand him completely. there is an extra chapter in our edition of Orientalism. late, we are. how many editions are there really? this is one of those books one should have read years ago. but … if you really think about it, better to have read it late than to not have read it at all. no? 

he talks about Said like the man is still alive. interesting. i am also in denial about a lot of people that way. except they’re not dead. he asks if the extra chapter was somewhat a letter of apology. i wonder too. something about the timeliness of the first publication, right before the Iranian Revolution. i don’t know … would i have done the same eventhough i knew my work was not meant to rouse any Persian or Arab uprising? i probably would, because i’m an idiot. i don’t mean to suggest that i think Said was an idiot to have written the extra chapter. 

or do i? 

the man talking to us … his hair is getting in the way of my concentration. it’s grayish, slightly balding in the front. he has a goatee of some sort. also distracting. there’s something Communist about it. it also reminds me of the policemen in Hindi films, although not quite. he looks disgruntled. i like him. he doesn’t like anyone. i like him more.

he continues to speak to himself in that language. and i’m happy to be the only one who understands.