When are the arches coming down?

I haven't been to the Penang Botanic Garden since the announcement was made by Dr Ng Yen Yen, the Minister of Tourism, on 26 Jun 2010 that the two arches at the Garden would be demolished by the state Drainage and Irrigation Department.

I'm sure that if work had already started on bringing them down, the news would have been reported by the newspapers. But there's none. So I can only assume that the arches are still standing and one of them may even be tilting more dangerously now.

However, I was surprised to read in the newspapers that the DID believed that the tilting arch held no danger for anyone. No urgency, according to the state DID director? No imminent danger, no immediate urgency? Incredible. "We will demolish the arches," he told the newspapers on 29 Jun 2010, "but are just waiting for the official go-ahead from the ministry. We have already contacted the Tourism Ministry to request the letter authorising the demolition." So everything now depends on the speed of bureaucracy, and we know how fast it is because....

...WHERE IS THE REPLY FROM THE MINISTRY?? I wrote more than a week ago that I could detect a tinge of sour grapes in the Minister's statement, that it didn't sound like a total recapitulation in good faith but one done grudgingly because of public opinion going against the project. It must be true. Unless someone tells me otherwise, I surmise that it must be true. The Minister is not backing down graciously yet. It's all done with a Big Dose of Reluctance. And the longer they delay the reply, the longer it will take to bring down Penang's eye-sore.

But perhaps I should be more skeptical about the supposed flow of communication between the DID and the Tourism Ministry. In this day and age, banking transactions across the country can be completed within seconds, emails across the globe can be sent within seconds, web pages also from across the globe can be loaded onto your computer within seconds and yet communication between Penang and Kuala Lumpur...

Okay, maybe I shouldn't expect the DID to be Internet-savvy. Maybe they still communicated through our postal services. Maybe the DID director typed a (gasp) letter on the old-fashioned type-writer and went searching for a postage stamp in which case, the Ministry of Tourism may have felt duty bound to reply the same way to the DID.

Or wait a minute...maybe, the DID did use email to communicate with the Ministry but...this is a wild guess, mind you...maybe the DID director took inspiration from this blog and sent his message by RealSmailMail. (I did say that the RealSnailMail service is fast, relatively speaking.) You know, anything is possible in this country and that might really explain what took place during the silence of the past 10 days...