Sherwood Condos
The Sunday edition of The Star has a section where kids/little demon spawns can submit their drawings/demon graffiti and have it published if it’s any cute (I’m reluctant to use the word ‘good’).
When I was in my early primary years, (I can’t remember whether I was 6 or 9 or somewhere in between), the section ran a little story on Robin Hood & his Merry Men. At the end of the story, they asked us young readers what we thought Sherwood Forest would look like in this modern day and age – draw it on a piece of paper, mail it to them and selected entries will be published the following Sunday. This was a time when I was still bothered to try and get anything of mine published in the mainstream Malaysian press. I thought long and hard about the topic and I came to the conclusion that surely by now,
You see, my dad worked in Environment back then and it is his nature to insist that his kids take much interest in his work even if he takes little real interest in ours. By the time I started school, I was relatively well-learned or at least aware of the issue of deforestation, illegal logging, sustainable and non-sustainable development, the clearing of rainforests to make way for a hydro-electric dam, all while struggling to multiply 7 by 12. I also grew up near Bukit Gasing and it was around this time that they started wrecking the green lung to make way for high rise condos. What was a nice, old suburb surrounded by greens before became a so-so, old suburb surrounded by another suburb.
Well anyway, all that thinking and drawing was a damn waste of time and stamps. The drawings that were selected to be published were those that depicted sparkling blue lakes, rainbows and flowers and big trees, squirrels and bunnies happily trawling fra-la-la around the forest in one big, kumbaya ecological love-fest. And if I remembered correctly, one even featured a unicorn. Give me a break - a bloody unicorn?!!! If unicorns didn’t exist back then, they sure as hell weren’t going to exist in the 90s and if they did, don’t you think they would’ve fallen victim to poachers for their magical horns?
But I’m not bitter. I still occasionally read The Star. Of course, that’s only because I have a pathological need to be lied to. Remember people, unicorns are real and every mushroom cloud has a rainbow lining.
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* The blogger insists that her drawing was not horrible. Her old art teachers from school might beg to differ. But then, in the words of Jonathan Swift, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” I’m a fucking genius!!!!!!!!!!! Uh. Ok, no. Maybe I just can’t draw.
