Development? What's that?

Over teh tarik I had a chat with a visiting friend who lamented that his kampung in Johore was lacking development. There was just one school nearby, a small row of kedai runcits, one surau, only two tarred roads, a few street lights. That's it. Nothing much has changed for the last 30 years he said.

I asked him what sort of development he would like to see?

Well, more tarred roads would be nice he said. Terrace houses instead of those wooden kampung houses. Another school perhaps. Modern shops. Maybe a shopping complex with a cinema. A few modern factories could help provide jobs and income and raise the standards of living at the kampung he said.

In his area, people survived mainly on oil palm, livestock farming (mainly chickens) and fruit plantations nearby.

I agreed with him. I grew up in that environment so I know exactly what its like. Those days, a day trip to Simpang Renggam or Batu Pahat was like going to heaven. So excited, I could never sleep the night before. Oh the things I would see and do in the big city!

But now that I'm older, maybe not much wiser but definitely older, my perspective has changed. Its not about nice buildings any more. Its not even about a bustling economy. Not that they aren't necessary. They are, if only to relieve us of the task of drawing water from the well, tiresome bullock carts and hiding our ringgit under the floorboards. I now see development as those things plus a whole lot more.

And what is this whole lot more?

Well, adding happiness, contentment and compassion into the pot would be nice.

Idealist? Of course, but no more idealist than wishing for multi-layered highways, a strip mall and an international airport in your kampung. 30 years ago, if you told the village folk in sleepy Dengkil that these things will rise up in their midst, they'll think you've gone bananas. Well guess what. Today they have Putrajaya, Cyberjaya and KLIA standing in their midst.

But as monuments of modernity come up, people forget that there's more than one side to development. I guess no one told us that "development" as we knew it was really nothing more than nice clothing. It doesn't necessarily make up for the moron in us. Now we know, because we've put the tagline "1st world facility, 3rd world mentality" firmly affixed to "Malaysia, truly Asia." Now we know that development is never a 2-in-1 deal. So we pause, curse a bit and say what the heck, let's build anyway. Better a fool with clothes on than a fool with no clothes on?

These days whenever I say development, I always mean it with a heavier slant on mental development. Its not just about having more schools or job skills. Its about the development of wholesome aspirations, attitudes, how we treat one another, how we treat the environment. Those, in my opinion, are just as important an indicator of development as the World Bank's obsession with GDP growth.

I've traveled quite a bit in my short lifetime. I've seen Japanese and European towns that haven't changed much over the years. Take a drive across the Alpine mountains and see how many of their kampungs are still kampungs. Funny. These people changed the world with their ideas, produced a procession of Nobel prize winners, and yet many of them who live outside the city centres still cycle, plant food, lead simple lives. I've made friends with a number of them. They have the same problems we have - family issues, environmental worries, living on a budget - but beyond that, the mindset is a world apart. They've picked up something we haven't, even though we've got more skyscrapers and fancy electronic gadgets in KL to show for our "development."

So I said to my friend yes, by all means, press for more development in your kampung but please don't forget, its not just what's on the outside that matters. I hope he understood what I meant.