amnesia

today, elfie (a fellow toa payoh folk) was lamenting the rise of two condominiums in front of his home and how the demographics of the place, and with that the atmosphere, shops, and so on, are going to become hip, young, and modernized. he told me the he liked the place a lot because of its old charm and the kind of breezy laid back-ness that comes with older residents. i've never ever thought of this town as charming. but when he said that, i looked out of the bus at flats from the 1970s and their mildly worn down cream coloured exterior and thought hmm oh yea!

coincidentally, i'm reading about social amnesia right now. this thing about memory and forgetting. and to quote this writer Connerton, he wrote that "a major source of forgetting is associated with the processes that separate social life from locality and from human dimensions; superhuman speed, megacities that are so enormous as to be unmemorable, consumerism disconnected from the labour process, the short lifespan of modern architecture, the disappearance of walkable cities. what is forgotten in modernity is profound, the human-scale-ness of life, the experience of living and working in a world of relations that are known."
and i thought... oh dear.. this is true! pragmatism and efficiency - our country's two favouritest words in the universe. why the hurry to run fast into the future?

with this in mind, i think i've figured out the thing about toa payoh central that i haven't really been able to put my finger on. the central area is very unlike the charming toa payoh 'suburbs' where elfie stays in. it is caught right in the middle of the processes of remembering and forgetting. it is very telling from the array of shops, the things they sell, the kind of fashion on display, the music they play, etc. there are a lot of old school elements that can be found (probably to appeal to the older residents around) but they're promoted as modernized versions of what used to be. it's like you can't survive if you don't flow with the new age trend. the central area is definitely changing with more and more franchises coming in, and upgrading will always be in progress as coffee shops shed their years to look like a mimicry of Food Junction. yea to think of it, this whole place is undergoing botox. And when i'm surrounded by elderly residents who embody the memories of another time and life, the place is a misfit. that is why my neighbourhood is hardly charming and is a jarring mix of the new and the old that doesn't really settle well.

why not age gracefully?