Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

When in Southeast Asia last year, I visited bookstores in each country. The magazine racks were particularly interesting.

In Bangkok, most of the magazines were foreign with their mastheads in English. I took this to mean they were direct imports and bought a couple, only to discover the contents were in Thai with only titles in English. Judging from the visuals, most articles were translated and a few locally produced. There were lots of foreign publications, all of them similarly handled. It appeared there was a thriving industry in translating magazines, with local content production slowly picking up.

In Kuala Lumpur, the magazines were all direct imports in English. There was no local production except a few independent publications that were clearly not up to international standards.

I thought this was rather telling of how the dominance of a language plays itself out. Let me explain.

The Thai language is closer to Chinese than to the Indo-European languages we are familiar with. In Thai, the tone with which a word is pronounced decides its meaning (see tonal languages). In Indo-European languages, intonation changes the type of sentence, usually between statement and question. For example, in English, a rising tone indicates a question, like in “You will come?”, while most Indian languages use a falling tone, like in “You will come-a?” or more likely “You will come, no?” The Thais have as much difficulty comprehending this as we have getting how the very meaning of a word can change with its tone. It is not possible to accurately transliterate Thai into the Roman alphabet because the Roman alphabet does not record tone.

Little wonder then, the Thais have so much difficulty speaking English, even in a tourist friendly place like Bangkok. English is no threat to the Thai language. It’s a curiosity that the foreigners use, and the foreigners have a lot of money, so one might as well indulge in it. Bangkok celebrates being hip with English. Signboards everywhere use it. Magazine titles and captions are all in English. The government encourages further use of the language. The local population couldn’t be more bothered. English is too inconvenient to ever be their primary language.

In Kuala Lumpur, everyone speaks English, with perfectly intelligible accents. It’s their first language (though to be fair, I did meet people who spoke Malay first and English second). The Malay language uses the Roman alphabet, so it’s all the more easier to learn English. The government goes out of its way to defend Malay from English. Signboards everywhere are only in Malay.

In Bangkok, my hostess Ton complained that Thai youth have no global outlook. They’re happy to limit their world to Thailand. In Kuala Lumpur, that was clearly not the case. If the magazine rack suggested anything, it is that Malaysians are so comfortable at being world citizens that their local media—and with that, their cultural traditions—are having a hard time holding up against imports.

A few days ago, I mentioned a gender activism video from Kuala Lumpur. jhybeturtle kindly consented to my hosting it, so here it is now. Watch the video (37.3 MB) »

Some of the participants you see here got arrested for their efforts. For more information, see the katagender blog or send them email.

Note: For unknown reasons, the katagender blog displays an unrelated page on “Amazing Bible Studies” to some browsers and the original site to others. It doesn’t appear to be ISP-level filtering since I get both versions. We suspect the site may have been hijacked and programmed to appear right to web spiders and certain audiences, while showing the hijacker’s site to others. Please leave me a comment indicating what you see: it’ll help figure out what’s going on.

Colin and I were at Titiwangsa in KL, looking for the Centre for Independent Journalism. We were lost and, after some circumambulating the block where we expected CIJ to be, we gave up and asked someone for directions.

The fellow responded in Hindi, which Colin didn’t understand. He saw the blank look on Colin’s face and asked if he spoke Hindi; once again in Hindi. At this point I was too amused to butt in, but Colin gleaned that one critical word and turned around to me, and I reluctantly carried forward the conversation.

Colin’s Malaysian, but could easily pass for an Indian. The fellow we spoke to looked Indian and must have taken us to be recent immigrants. To visit a foreign country and be spoken to in your own language, unasked for, is surreal. This was hardly an isolated event. Waiters at restaurants have attempted to chat me up in Tamil, to which I’ve mournfully responded “Tamil teriyaadu. Kannada, Telugu.”

Of all the places on this trip, KL’s easily the place I felt most at home in.

In KL, Zee put me in touch with her acquaintance Julie Tan, who works with the NGO Action for Life. Julie took me out to lunch, where I learnt that “Chinese” and “vegetarian” put together do not make a paradox. That ended my run of Indian meals.

Julie noticed I was sniffling and asked about my health. I said I had picked up a cold in Cambodia that refused to let up, and had two mouth ulcers that made eating and talking painful. She said it must be heat. Not heat as in temperature, but body heat caused by poor diet and exertion from my travels. She said it was a concept from Chinese medicine. I told her it was the same in India. (People not familiar with this may find it hard to understand.)

Julie insisted on feeding me fruit and said I should get some medicine to relieve the heat. We went to the neighbourhood Chinese medical store where she explained it to the store manager. The item she wanted wasn’t on the shelves. The manager asked if I had a fever. I said it was only a cold. He disappeared into the back room and returned shortly with three warm bottles of coloured liquid that he explained as being made of herbs that would flush out my heat. One bottle for the afternoon, one for the night, and one for the next morning. I had to take them with warm water. Nine ringgit per bottle of 100 mL each.

I didn’t know what to make of this. The bottles were unlabelled. Their contents had been concocted in the back room. Anything could be in there. And twenty seven ringgit (Rs 325) isn’t exactly spare change. I looked at Julie apprehensively. She said it was Chinese medicine, very reliable. There was a doctor in the back room who could tell what my ailments were by looking at my hands and face. He didn’t charge for consultation, but I’d have to pay for whatever he prescribed. The manager handed me a card for a Goh Boon Cheow (Ivan), Acupuncturist & Physician. Apparently he’s Vice President of Acupuncture Society of Malaysia. Would I want to meet him?

I declined and asked about the concoction again. What did it taste like? Sweet? The manager shook his head vigourously and handed me some Chinese plums. They were wrapped like toffees. The print said they had been packaged in China. So it was going to be bitter.

There I was, about to pay a good deal of money for a bitter concoction of unknown composition that would supposedly cure me of ambiguous ailments. Did I really want to do this? What the heck, it was a new experience. I could write about it!

It was only mildly bitter. Whether it was the medicine or the genial atmosphere of Kuala Lumpur, I cannot tell, but by the time I left I was feeling much better. The nose block’s nearly abated. The ulcers are still there, but they don’t burn anymore. I feel good.

Popagandhi has nifty pictures from the streets of Kuala Lumpur. Check them out, yo.

Whatever creaky infrastructure Reliance uses to bring text messaging to a non-GSM network isn’t well oiled. Messages I’ve sent Reliance users from Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore have all failed to deliver. Potential Reliance users with global aspirations, please note.

And then again, Zee complains messages she’s sending me on the Singapore number don’t deliver, but messages to Airtel roaming on the same provider (Starhub) get through.

New number in Singapore is +65-8203-0690. Card cost four times as much as in Malaysia and messaging costs twice. They also wanted identification and put me in a queue half hour. In KL I could buy it like any other commodity at a convenience store.

From grand experience of one day, Malaysian telecom is better than Singapore’s.

I fired up my news reader for the first time in three months and it promptly fetched me 582 headlines off 82 feeds. I hadn’t missed a single one all this while. Some serious pruning is in order.

We watched television last night. The dialogues were so dramatic, I couldn’t bear to keep looking. Real people never speak like that.

And then again, in KL Friday, I hung out with jhybeturtle and her friends, who speak to each other in English. Their accents were curious, so for a while I stopped listening to the conversation, listening to the sound of their voices instead.

You know what? It sounded exactly like a Hong Kong movie dubbed into English. Maybe not exactly the same for someone intimate with the accents, but my ear isn’t that tuned yet. Real people speak like that after all, it seems.

Jhybe and friends were making their (bi-?)weekly trip to the police station, having all been arrested for various acts of activism and subsequently released on bail. Including one person from the ASEAN summit protest I got pictures of. The station near Masjid Jamek looked remarkably like an Indian government office. One young officer gestured me aside and asked something in Malay. I didn’t understand. He tried again. “What is wrong with your friends?” I said I didn’t know. Jhybe turned around and asked what was up, at which he mumbled “nothing” and hurried away.

I have a video of their gender inequalities demonstration that I can host if they don’t mind it circulated. It’s a little under 40 MB; about 4 minutes. Jhybe?

Later in the evening, Dennis, who is trying to make a career out of activism, asked if I was an activist too. I said I would have been, but I don’t have a cause. There are things that bother me, like the state of mass media (including blogs pining mass reach) and their role in (mis)education, but I’m far too lost making sense of the landscape to be any sort of activist. The best I can do is hang out with them and understand their concerns.

You’ve got to take the day train from Kuala Lumpur to Singapura.^† The Malaysian countryside is gorgeous.

Singapore immigration was the first place they insisted on scanning bags. Sniffer dogs inspected the train. Among the list of items needing declaration are books and magazines. Certain categories of publications are not welcome here, you see.

† As far as the Malaysian railways are concerned, the place is called Singapura. What fun if they decide to rename the country to lose its colonial hangover.

Today I took to wandering the streets of Kuala Lumpur. This place could easily pass for some forgotten corner of Madras.

I wandered into a random restaurant near KLCC and asked if they had vegetarian food. The woman gestures at the items in front of her and says “all these items are vegetarian” in a clear Tamil accent. “Except that is fish over there. And that there is rasam.” While I’m standing there wondering what to do next, she thrusts a plate of rice at me and points at the rasam again. I help myself.

Happiest meal yet.

Sham’s wife has been making rasam daily, but it’s an entirely different experience getting to eat it at a restaurant. If this continues, it won’t be long before I fully recover from the poor diet in Bangkok.

This morning Iqbal and I were at KLCC when we saw a commotion.

Photographers falling over themselves; video cameras hoisted above heads. It wasn’t clear who was in the middle. The ASEAN Summit was in progress and this was the last day. Did it just end? Were the press attempting to get final statements from some important speaker?

I looked for where all the cameras were pointing at. Two or three girls, maybe in early twenties, surrounded by cops, surrounded by the mob. The crowd had gathered for them? It didn’t make sense. Then I noticed the cops were far too close to the girls for dignity. They weren’t protecting them from the mob, they were escorting them somewhere, and not being very friendly.

The mob passed and another presented itself. The one in the picture. There was less ambiguity here. The cops were clearly manhandling someone, dragging him away. He didn’t seem to resist. Iqbal said he looked familiar; maybe he was an opposition leader.

I wanted to get into the mob, get a better picture, see what was happening in there. Some streak of rationality demanded I not. I had just arrived in a country with unfamiliar civil liberties and no longer had my passport on me. No point risking a fling with authority pandering to fantasies of photo journalism.

When we returned home, I got online to look for news of what had just happened. A report said some people had been arrested for protesting at the ASEAN summit about something related to Burma. The site wanted me to pay up to read the rest. That was all I could find.

jhybeturtle now has a fuller report on what happened. Six people were arrested for a peaceful gathering to highlight unresolved and long standing issues such as human rights abuses in Burma and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, among other issues. They were arrested even before they began their protest, for just being on the scene. The man Iqbal identified is Tian Chua, Information Chief of the opposition party, Parti Keadilan Rakyat.

When I stepped out of KL Sentral Stesen looking for the YMCA, the Petronas towers were visible behind it. “Ah! They’re just around the corner,” I thought happily.

Later in the evening, halfway across the city, they still looked just around the corner.

So I’m in Kuala Lumpur and wondering where to go next. When I started this trip, I had no clear agenda beyond that I was going to visit four neighbouring countries and experience a slice of local life. I was making it up as I went along.

It’s one thing to read about these places and see pictures. It’s another to walk the roads of a strange new city, fending for oneself, experiencing first hand the sights, sounds and grime.

Bangkok was a metropolis, and full of character at that. In Bangkok I found a theme that could carry me through the trip: visit all the metropolises in the region and experience the subtle differences to their characters. On the surface, all big cities are the same: they have wide roads and flyovers and mass transport and rush hours and traffic jams, and are different only for the topography they were built on.

Yet, deeper, each city has unique character. It’s fascinating. In Bangkok, for example, English is a distant second language, used only because it makes for contact with the farangs. It’s otherwise unwanted. Leave the city and even road signs no longer use it. Contrarily, In Kuala Lumpur practically everyone speaks it, in an accent perfectly intelligible to my South Indian upbringing. English is native here.

It makes sense therefore, to round off the trip with another metropolis, using Singapore to counter observations from Bangkok and KL. Cambodia was to be just a side show, visited because its monuments are world famous and it’s so close from Bangkok.

I didn’t expect Cambodia to be a love affair.

I didn’t expect to be so moved by the warmth of the Cambodian people. I didn’t expect to cry learning about their recent history. Now I’m torn between going ahead with visiting Singapore versus returning to Cambodia. There isn’t enough time for both.

Singapore makes rational sense. It’ll round off the study and it’s cheaper. I have friends there for accommodation and a plane ticket out of the place. Changing that ticket at short notice is going to cause a big dent in my budget. To get to Cambodia from Malaysia, I’ll have to fly; another significant expense. It doesn’t help at all that Cambodia runs on USD. (“Hey mister, you wanna buy a cold drink? Only one dollar.” Only, my foot.) And I’ll have to pay for accommodation again. I had no budget for accommodation for the second half of the trip.

I’m staying at Sham’s place here in KL. Sham had to make an unplanned trip to New Zealand and will not be back while I’m here, but was kind enough to put me up with his family. Yes, it’s a bit awkward landing up on unfamiliar people.

For either Singapore or Cambodia, I have to apply for a visa. Each will take at least three days. With one and a half weeks left, it can only be one of the two.

Either I postpone the love affair for another time, or I go for it, and return to Bangalore looking for income rather more desperately.

What should I pick?

Kuala Lumpur looks great from the sky. It’s covered with Palm groves that look like the curls on a Thai Buddha’s head. The horizon’s framed with a mountain range peeking through clouds. There seems to be a lot more open space here than in Bangkok.

I’m at Kuala Lumpur Sentral Stesen, where they have free wi-fi and a Starbucks. Looks like I can finally upload pictures.

KLIA immigration was the best ever. It took about 2 minutes. I walked up, found myself alone in the queue, handed over passport and arrival card, said “yes” when the fellow asked “holiday?”, and that was it!

The arrival card needed an address. Since I had no planned accommodation, I asked the fellow next to me. He had no clue either—he declared “Crown Plaza Hotel, Kuala Lumpur”. I used the same.

New number in Malaysia is +60-16-321-4530. yawhatever and jackol, thanks for your messages last time. It was too expensive to respond there, but is cheap here.