The Transformation of Malaysia

I visited Kuala Lumpur for the first time in 2004 and I was totally sold out. Despite being a Muslim nation, the people looked pretty liberal, going about their national sport – shopping – with a smile on their lips. Never once did I see anyone – man or woman – glancing at another one wearing skimpy or weird clothes. Everything was par for the course.
Then I went to Kuala Lumpur again in 2007 and it took me a long while to figure out that these were the same streets I roamed in 2004. Only the Petronas Towers looked recognisable. And I went around looking for reasons for this transformation.
One, I guess, is the influx of the Saudi Arabian Tourist. Malaysia is quite modern, has decent facilities, is cheap and to top it all, is an Islamic nation. It’s quite secular though. So the Saudi Arabian Tourist, who I guess, finds he’s not too welcome in the West, has started flocking to South East Asian nations, particularly to Malaysia. By some independent figures, 6,837 Saudis visited Malaysia in July 2005. In July 2006, their number had grown to 10,788. The July 2007 figures are yet to come in but I reckon that would have gone upwards of 20,000.
When we went to Kuala Lumpur in August 2007, nearly every hotel was packed to capacity. The Saudi Arabian Tourist with wads of cash was visible at each and every shopping mall. A taxi driver told me that Saudi Arabians had started flocking to Malaysia because it was too hot in the Wahabbi nation at that time of the year (I was not able to independently verify this).
So there has been this change in Malaysia over the last three years or so. Mini-skirts and shorts which were the norm in 2004 when I first visited KL were nowhere to be seen. In fact, even jeans were very rare – only on Westerners (I must mention here that I stayed in KL for 2 days and it is a bit unfair to judge a city by staying there for 3-4 days – doing things that a regular tourist does).
To attract the Saudi Arabian Tourist, Malaysia has even named a street “Arab Street” in the Bukit Bintang area – the hub of shopping and touristy activities – to let him do the things he does all the time, smoke sheesha, dig into his favourite food, etc.
There were other ways in which KL did not appeal to me much as a tourist destination. The city has become really dirty – there were wrappers, paper and bits of garbage all over on the monorail tracks – and the traffic is maddening. In 2004, I was so impressed by the traffic movement. People would stop at least 15 metres from the vehicle ahead. Nobody honked the horn. I stayed there for 15 days and not once did I hear anyone sounding the horn.
But this year the situation was quite different. There were vehicles everywhere, and horns were being sounded freely in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. There was a bus driver I saw who had his hand on the horn button and was constantly honking it. And he looked angry – the scene wasn’t very different from the one in Delhi, where Blueline drivers muscle their way in and warn other road users by blowing the horn and coming within kissing distance of other vehicles.
The taxi drivers in KL were never honest but his time I found asking them to go by the meter was a fruitless exercise. Not only did they charge exorbitant rates, there taxis were very dirty and the aircon didn’t work well either. (In KL, taxis and buses have to have the aircon on all the time).
But what worries me most is the informal dress code imposed on people in Malaysia. Beyonce Knowles had to recently cancel a show in KL because “showing skin is against Islam”.
Reminds me of a certain city which went from skirts in the Eighties to a veil from head to toe in the Nineties. I just hope KL doesn’t go the same way – it’s just too dear to me to be lost to religion.