Kuala Lumpur is the third rudest city in the world according to a survey conducted by Readers Digest (of all people!), as reported by The Times of London.

Malaysians who have lived and worked in our nation's proud capital, and who have the good fortune of travelling extensively overseas, need no global survey to know that indeed rudeness - among many other negative things - is a way of life in KL.

At least I live my rather sedentary life as a reclusive pensioner atop Bukit Cheras, if you can call this sort of existence "living a life". I have nothing but sympathy for the millions of KL residents who have to eke out a living in this sun-baked, rain-flooded, chaotic, anarchical, choking, intimidating, hostile, and filthy city.

The moment you leave your residence early in the morning, and begin to move around in your car or some form of public transport, the shock of aggravation that hits you in the face is unimaginable.

By the time you grind through the snarling traffic and arrive at the office, even before you start the day's work, you are already brimming with bile in your mouth, all too ready to be offended, and dreaming of the long weekend to arrive the next day.

When you eventually reach home in the late evening, you would be thoroughly burnt out, the toxin of resentment and frustration at work coursing through your veins. Can you imagine the unfair torment of those working ladies, who would then have to cook for the husband and the kids, tidy up the house, and do the laundry?

An epic journey

I know of some KL people who have to travel for up to three hours daily, some driving for over a hundred kilometres, just to get to and from work.

Getting from point A to point B is no longer a matter of simple locomotion. It is an epic journey after the fashion of Homer's Odyssey, packed with daunting perils and opportunities for misadventures. Along the way, one stands the chance of being run down by speeding cars, mugged by snatch-thieves, or brutalised by road-bullies. For ladies, the fear of sexual assault is always a stranger away.

Of course there is neither time nor space for social activity and family life that would otherwise rejuvenate the soul. Certainly, one's mental and emotional space is so cluttered as to leave little room for niceties and courtesy.

To call this city life in the fast lane a "rat race" is an insult to the rats. Rats only scramble for food and reproduction. KL people have an ever-expanding menu of real and perceived needs.

Here the hunger of desires is ravenous. People are consumed by a fire that burns day and night, 24/7, forever striving for goals created by the myth of prosperity and happiness, and propagated in the ubiquitous subliminal messages bombarding one's consciousness from the advertisements that saturate our public space.

The vision of the good life, for those in the business world at least, is really no different from that in New York or London. One needs the 5 Cs, to carve out a career path, to dedicate one's entire life to the prospect of financial security, earn recognition from others, and in the process, find self-actualisation. One needs love desperately too, in a city existence that tends to stifle or distort that very noble sentiment.

The concept of neighbourhood and the spirit of the community have largely disappeared in this metropolis of rapid upward mobility.

Simply put, this City of the Muddy Estuary has grown too fast and too large for its own good. Old timers can still recall the good old days when the Merlin Hotel was the first choice of travellers. It has since given way to the Concord Hotel Today, the core of the city has been turned inside out by the mushrooming of gleaming skyscrapers, monoliths of concrete and glass that trap heat, traffic, and people alike.

With their new found wealth, the original natives of KL moved outwards to the many suburban townships. From the eighties onwards, I think, the city began to grow like a mammoth amoeba, towards Klang to the east, Kajang and Seremban to the south, and Sungei Buluh and Rawang to the north.

Wealth attracts migrants

The well-travelled Nobel laureate VS Naipaul made his second visit to KL in 1995 on his tour of four Muslim countries. He had this to say about his impression of our city, "In 1979, Malaysia had been rich; now (1995) it was extraordinarily rich."

Never mind that he has committed the excusable mistake of identifying the wealth of a capital city with a whole country. Even a Malaysian native like me never ceases to be amazed by the mad pace of physical change that overwhelms KL. It is always building, transforming entirely its facade once every five years or so. Nowadays, it is impossible to know where KL ends, and where Selangor begins. People in this part of Malaysia tend to regard the whole area as "Klang Valley."

This wealth is built on the contribution of massive internal migration from the rest of the country, as well as a huge influx of both legal and illegal foreign workers numbering in the millions. In turn, the burgeoning wealth attracts even more migrants, until all aspects of daily life groan under the weight of over-crowding.

Eventually, everyone in KL is an alien of sort, including those who had been born and bred in the city itself. As Sartre would say, Hell is other people, and we are all amateurs in this business of feeling lonely.

Within the confine of their home and their car, they are kings in their castle. The homes have many locks and iron grills on all exits, and the car must be double-locked at all times. Behind bars in their home, they are trapped like prisoners. But the prison at least offers security and refuge from the raging jungle outside. Within that little private physical space at least, they can be loving and courteous to a small band of friends and relatives, according to their fine Asian traditions. Outside the door, where the jungle begins, the traditional values no longer applies.

Precisely because the public space is perceived to be an lawless jungle, where big fish eat small fish, and the fittest shall survive, public behaviour is dictated by selfish needs and vanity. This 'Kiasu" mentality is nowhere more evident than the driving habits of KL people. It is as if every motorist mutters to himself as he drives,"Aye, though this is the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil because I'm the meanest son-of-a-b*t*h in the whole valley."

If a city has a kind of personality, then indeed KL is like a newly-rich person, opulent, ostentatious, impatient, loud, boorish, vain beyond salvation, and totally deficient in civic consciousness and social grace.

'Why do I live in KL?'

Alternatively, we can compare a city to a fruit. If New York is a Big Apple to the Americans, then surely KL is a Big Durian, pungent and revolting in its sewer-like odour, but erotically and compellingly seductive to Malaysian taste-buds only.

Whenever I make this sort of comments, the usual response is, "Then why do you live here? Why don't you go back home?"

Well, at the end of the day, you cannot deny that KL does have a kind of perverse attraction. Everything is moving at break-neck speed in a river of constant flux with a kind of raw animal energy.

Even at dead of night, when most people are in bed, the city centre is still very much alive. The skyline is pulsating with a dull hum as rhythmic as the heart-beat of a primordial beast. The will to raw power is what fascinates me.

Of course, after a while, I keep catching myself behaving in public like your standard KL Joe. My only antidote is my dream of the rolling hills, the emerald forest and the blue sky back home. One day, I shall return home, to die my death there. Meanwhile, this is a fascinating sojourn here in the Big Durian, a transit station among many transit journeys.

The Filipino novelist Sionil Jesus once wrote in one of his books, "Every capital city is the asshole of the nation."

Just because KL is a rude city does not mean that all Malaysians are rude. In many small towns and villages throughout the far-flung corners of our country, traditional values still abound, and courtesy and politeness are very much alive, acting like social lubricants that nourish our Malaysian brand of neighbourliness and community spirit.

There, in the laid-back backwaters and tropical outback of original Malaysia, the hysteria and madness of modernity has not taken such a severe toll on the soul of the people. Irrespective of their ethnic persuasion, those Malaysians live a simple life, and have simple needs. Their communal adat still flourishes, giving them great pleasure in the enjoyment in every joyful encounter with their fellow human beings.

Even so, dark clouds are gathering ominously on the horizon. The irresistible march of modernity is fast encroaching upon those last bastions of what is good about Malaysia, with a deadly nihilism that only modernity can bring, in the sense of what Nietzsche tried to characterise in his enigmatic words, "God is dead, and all things are permitted."