Shah Alam not Sin City

FEB 18 — Let me start by stating some things that will be a repetition to most, so you can all just skip this paragraph if it annoys you. I drink alcohol, I am a liberal and I live in and love Shah Alam. And if there is one thing PAS did right in Selangor, it was to fire Hasan Ali from its party. And yes, PAS, for all its religious advocacy, deserves some applause and ovation for doing what I would say was the right thing.

I wonder how many of you have heard or read Hasan Ali’s recent labelling of Shah Alam as a city decadent with sin. According to Hasan Ali, prostitution is rampant and citizens in Shah Alam are now purchasing alcohol in the droves.

With the way this religious hack portrays Shah Alam, perhaps in his vivid imagination, it sounds as though the city is at the point that drunken orgies take place after an evening  of football at Stadium Shah Alam. And I thought he was already insane when he thought solar-powered bibles were converting the nation to Christianity.

I have lived in Shah Alam for about 25-years now. I went to kindergarten here, primary school in Section 6 Shah Alam and secondary school in Section 2 Shah Alam. And even after matriculation, I spent another three years in UiTM Shah Alam doing my degree in Information Technology. For years after that, while working, I stayed in Shah Alam with my parents, hung out with current and former UiTM Shah Alam students in Section 7 Shah Alam.

Now, some Malays use the term “tak berkembang” to describe my insistence on being constantly in this city. In fact, some gay people think that living in Shah Alam is the equivalent of staying in some kampong or uncivilised, no-entertainment-allowed zone in Malaysia.

I dispute these claims by stating that Shah Alam is a city that encourages people to look for ways to entertain themselves, like reading and writing articles for The Malaysian Insider to get money to spend outside of Shah Alam.

I love this city for being out of Kuala Lumpur because I need some form of peace and quiet in a community that is religiously conservative but socially liberal. As long as you keep your actions to yourself, the people of Shah Alam generally in the Sections 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1, which is UiTM, will leave you to your own devices. Heck, in some instances, they even bother to join in.

Personally, my thoughts on Shah Alam is of a community that lives up to Hillary Clinton’s saying that it takes a village, in which I have neighbours handing me a bag of rambutans just for walking in front of their homes, retired teachers being also my neighbours asking me to write an article on some topic or another, and current UiTM students asking me to elaborate on public relations while hanging out at a restaurant owned by a former co-worker in a GLC.

We don’t have cinemas, bars or alcohol-serving night clubs anywhere in this city per se. And as our MP, Khalid Abdul Samad, points out, you can’t buy alcohol at the 7-Eleven’s in various sections of Shah Alam. And these actions were done even before Pakatan Rakyat took over Selangor. In Section 2, the SMKSSAAS teachers talked the local 7-Eleven into stopping the sale of alcohol.

Instead, to buy alcohol, one would have to walk into hypermarkets like Giant and Tesco, which are widely spaced and with a segregated alcohol sale area that is very transparent, where you have to basically buy alcohol in bulk and, as the Malay saying goes, “tebalkan muka and buat tak malu (be shameless about it)”.

And most people in Shah Alam do not drink alcohol in Shah Alam. Instead, we head out of the area, to places like Laundry Bar, which Hasan Ali himself raided on New Year’s Eve 2011 from his comfy home in TTDI. In that sense, we do respect the Sultan’s insistence of leaving the city to do our own personal liberal vices, to go outside the city his father, Almarhum Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah, built from scratch.

As for Hasan Ali’s assertion that prostitution was rampant in Shah Alam, again, I beg to differ. Just where exactly are these prostitutes going to ply their trade? Shah Alam is not exactly a place with hotels booming everywhere, with very few small hotels for people to actually get their groove on, as Hasan Ali alleges. You can’t even find a single spray-painted offer for a “volcano massage” anywhere in Shah Alam!

Shah Alam is very far from being the city full of alcoholics and womanisers that Hasan Ali insists it is. It never was since its establishment. And personally, I will sum this up simply. Shah Alam is not Sin City, but PAS did help the city get rid of a Yellow Bastard.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.