Christmas Day in Seri Kembangan
25 December 2008
Christmas Day, Seri Kembangan
Our Christmas lunch was at a home-based kedai just across Chuyuan’s parents’ house where we are staying. The kedai is famous for their curry noodle soup and their ABC, shaved ice with sweetened milk, beans, preserved fruit and jelly - a bit like the Filipino halo-halo. The curry noodle soup was quite good too - one gets a choice between two kinds of noodles and choice of ham, tofu, cheesedogs, sausages, dried fungus and other such things to go with the noodles. The curry soup , toasted sesame seeds and spicy sauce they put on it combine into a really nice tasty meal. The kedai is also good because they serve fresh fruit such as pineapple, guava, watermelon and papaya.
Our Christmas lunch! The colored plastic clothes pegs are like “price tags” computed after one has finished eating.
After lunch, we decided to take a walk down to a small river near the village. It was quite a pleasant walk, investigating the flora and fauna of the place. 
Along the way we saw a lovely blue kingfisher. There are also quite a number of species of birds - from crows to sparrows to several types of pigeons. We also saw a lizard (an Iguana, perhaps) and I was able to take some photographs. 
The village iguana.
Shortly, we met a small plump woman who called out to us as if she knew us. We were so surprised and wondered if we knew her. Later we realized that she was rather mentally retarded and is known to many in the village where she is free to roam around, and then gets food, drink and some money from the villagers. She seems very well looked after. She was so happy to see Trevor specially, explaining in both Chinese and a bit of English and “sign language” how Trevor looked like Father Christmas! We were so amused - and we greeted her back “Merry Christmas!”
Along the walkway near the river was a playground and exercise place where Trevor and I stayed for a while. Afterwards, we returned to the house and prepared our gifts to Chuyuan’s parents - a fruitcake we bought at Carrefour yesterday afternoon, and three sets of materials for Churidhar that we got in a shop called Roopmilan in Trivandrum near Bhadra Homestay. Mr. T. Sasi Mohan told us that Roopmilan was a good shop, so hopefully, we got good churidhar materials!
Enough exercise for the day!
It was an excellent Christmas dinner at home with Jay, Chuyuan and her parents. Chuyuan cooked some lamb in a turbo broiler with the potatoes at the bottom of the broiler - which reminded me of my cousin grace who likes to cook a whole chicken in the turbo broiler. Except that instead of having vegetables, Grace collected all the chicken fat that dripped to the bottom and used that for making gravy! Super healthy!
There was some time over Christmas dinner to talk about the early life in the village, Trevor was particularly curious. Seri Kembangan is one of a number of “kampung baru” or “New Villages” (or Chinese New Villages) created by the British during the end of the colonial period in Malaysia in the 1950’s. The purpose of creating the settlements (or internment camps) was to segregate village population and cut the flow of support, food, materials, information and recruits to the communist guerilla army.
The re-settlement was a forced one, removing people from their land and housing them in partially fortified camps with round-the-clock police supervision. Some 440 new villages were created during the Malayan emergency. Completing the program was the hunger drive, to expel the guerilla army from the jungles, and a program of (re-)education. Anyone who is aware of social engineering knows the drill. Making people miserable ten winning hearts and minds …
This reminded me of a number of other re-settlements taking place recently, for example, in Bangalore. In discussions with the family at Bhadra Homestay, we learn more about the dark side of Bangalore’s status as the “Silicon Valley of India” and its development into a base for numerous public sector heavy industries, software companies, aerospace, telecommunications, and defense organisations. This “progress” is not without social costs, in particular, the social costs of re-settlements.
Byatha N Jagadeesh wrote in the Sunday Vijay Times, June 2006:
“The number of people in India displaced by developmental activities such as dams, mining and construction of infrastructure since independence is estimated at 33 million. The long history of forcible displacement and inadequate resettlement and rehabilitation of the project-affected people have created huge problems in our society.”
Jagadeesh calls for a more intelligent national rehabilitation policy. Personally, I am less optimistic of rehabilitation or resettlement programs and policies insofar as those implementing the programs are not directly affected by them, for as long as global society today maintains a system of perverse incentives …