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FOOD EVENT AUGUST

 

Food Expos and Festivals

Tastefully Wonderfood Merdeka Edition:
• Dates: August 7 – 9, 2026
• Time: 10:00 AM – 10:00 PM
• Location: Mid Valley Exhibition Centre (MVEC), Kuala Lumpur
• Details: Features food street zones, vendor booths like Oat Story, and interactive games.
Foodie Papa Fest:
• Dates: August 13 – 16, 2026
• Location: Amerin Mall, Seri Kembangan, Selangor
• Details: Part of the mall's month-long Merdeka celebration featuring local street food and snacks. 
Konsert Asian Food Festival:
• Dates: August 27 – 31, 2026
• Location: Amerin Mall, Seri Kembangan, Selangor
• Details: A combination of Asian street food vendors, cultural activities, and a Merdeka countdown celebration. 
MTML Retail Bazaar F&B Line-up:
• Dates: August 3 – 7, 2026
• Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
• Location: Menara Tokio Marine, Jalan Tun Razak, Kuala Lumpur
• Details: Corporate pop-up bazaar featuring cooked food, snacks, desserts, and homemade treats. 

Merdeka Dining Promos

Wyndham Garden i-City Shah Alam Hi-Tea Buffet:
• Dates: August 29, 30, and 31, 2026
• Time: 12:30 PM – 4:00 PM
• Location: Shah Alam, Selangor
• Details: Special National Day weekend buffet with local favorites and a promo where babies dine free with a minimum purchase of 3 adult pax.

EVENT JULY

If you are located in the Shah Alam/Selangor area, there are a few notable business, community, and national activities to keep on your radar:

SAMENTA Hyperlokal AI Fest 2026 (Penang): While hosted in Penang at the Safetyware Group HQ, local SMEs across Selangor can tune into this nationwide initiative designed to make AI integration accessible to everyday businesses.

Tupperware 80th Anniversary Event: A milestone virtual celebration taking place online via the Tupperware Malaysia Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube pages featuring giveaways and brand history.

Business e-Invoicing Compliance: With the national e-invoicing rollout progressing, many corporate and business networking events are being held locally to ensure businesses understand the tax requirements managed by the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation.

Growing Out of the Concrete: Time, Gravity, and the Raymond Carver Ghost in David Gray’s ‘The Sapling’

There is a moment in our lives where the weight of what we carry finally breaks the surface. On "The Sapling," the hypnotic opening track of his eleventh studio album Gold in a Brass Age, David Gray confronts this emotional reckoning head-on. Opening with the vulnerable, almost breathless admission, "I kept it bottled up too long," Gray pulls us into a lush, electro-acoustic thicket where time isn’t just passing—it’s actively reshaping us.

The Weight of Unspoken Time

You can hear the ticking of the clock in the very architecture of the song. Moving away from the sweeping, radio-ready hooks of his White Ladder days, Gray adopts a "cut-and-paste" aesthetic here, blending a chopped-up acoustic guitar loop with subtle, pulsing electronics. It feels experimental yet deeply intimate.

The song is a masterclass in the brevity of life. Gray’s voice, hushed into a delicate falsetto, registers the shock of looking in the mirror and realizing how quickly the years slip through our fingers. The "sapling" becomes a gorgeous, bittersweet metaphor: a fragile living thing trying to take root in the middle of London’s fast-paced, regenerative chaos. It is a song about aging, the accumulation of silent regrets, and the desperate, beautiful instinct to finally speak before the light fades.

The Raymond Carver Connection

Your instinct about the literary undertones of this track hits the bullseye. The album’s title, Gold in a Brass Age, is lifted directly from Raymond Carver’s late-period short story, Blackbird Pie.

For anyone familiar with Carver’s minimalism, the connection makes total sense. Blackbird Pie is a story steeped in domestic mystery, sudden estrangement, and the realization that we can live alongside someone for decades without ever truly communicating. When Gray sings about keeping things bottled up, he is channeling that exact Carver-esque dread: the tragic human tendency to stay silent until the foundation has already crumbled. Like a Carver story, "The Sapling" doesn’t offer neat, tidy resolutions. Instead, it captures the raw cadence of a man waking up to the passage of time, realizing that the small, unspoken things are often the ones that weigh the most.

The Verdict: "The Sapling" is a mesmerizing piece of atmospheric folk-pop. It’s the sound of an artist refusing to stagnate, looking back at his own history, and finding a strange, quiet grace in letting go.

Putrajaya at 30: a capital city without a soul

A capital city cannot inspire if it goes to sleep at 7pm.

Returning from abroad recently, I made a short stop in Singapore. One evening, I joined my wife and daughter at a concert at the iconic Singapore’s National Stadium in Kallang.

I was astonished. About 60,000 people filled the arena, singing and dancing with the performers for nearly three hours.

And here’s the economics: the cheapest ticket cost S$600. The organiser and stadium must have generated staggering revenue from that single show. And it wasn’t a one-off — the concert ran for three consecutive nights.

Singapore is far ahead in harnessing pop culture, crowds, and connectivity to generate economic energy.

Reality at home 

Back in Malaysia, I learned that Putrajaya has just marked its 30th anniversary.

Construction began in 1995 with ambitious hopes. Putrajaya was meant to be Malaysia’s crown jewel: a symbol of architectural confidence, engineering capability and modern governance.

It was supposed to embody national aspirations — an orderly, technologically advanced, efficient and culturally rich capital, open to all Malaysians.

Three decades later, that vision remains unrealised. Instead of becoming a vibrant national stage, Putrajaya has become a sterile administrative enclave — impressive from afar, hollow up close. It reflects neither Malaysia’s society nor its success.

A city built for cars, not people 

Putrajaya is one of Asia’s most car-centric planned cities — and today, the most car-dependent city in Malaysia.

Wide highways, oversized roundabouts and long empty distances between precincts make walking impractical. Public buses are almost invisible. Amenities are scattered far apart.

Unlike Singapore, where concert-goers walk seamlessly to MRT stations, Putrajaya remains a “drive-through city” — buildings surrounded by vast, lifeless parking lots, one which goes to sleep at 7pm.

Even its main exhibition centre, the Putrajaya International Convention Centre (PICC), is reachable almost exclusively by car.

As any transport planner would say: a good city is one you can walk in comfort and feel safe. Putrajaya fails this fundamental test.

Outdated planning philosophy 

Putrajaya is stuck in a 1990s design mindset, out of sync with modern urban norms.

Despite decades of lessons, no meaningful effort has been made to rebalance private vehicles with public transport.

The consequences are clear:

• The MRT station sits far from the city centre.
• You still need a car to reach the MRT.
• There is no major art centre, museum, theatre or cultural institution.
• No stadium like Kallang, no music hall or performance venue.
• No cycling lanes, walkable districts or friendly neighbourhoods.
• No pedestrian streets, street cafés or creative public spaces.
• So who, exactly, was this capital city built for?

Unlike Washington DC, Tokyo, London, Paris, or even Bangkok — all of which serve as cultural and civic stages — Putrajaya lacks the community life expected of a capital.

Other capitals teem with concerts, exhibitions, outdoor festivals, parades, debates, and civic expression. Putrajaya offers none of this.

No cultural, economic or social energy 

Putrajaya’s urban design offers monuments instead of districts, administrative buildings instead of communities. Form without life.

No capital city can survive on civil servants alone. A city needs a creative class, cultural institutions, universities, artists, entrepreneurs and students. Putrajaya lacks all of these.

It performs administrative functions well, but it does not embody the nation it represents.

Imagine what Putrajaya could have been

It could have been:

• A transit hub with airport express trains, MRT, trams or BRT, and walkable districts.
• A cultural capital with galleries, libraries, museums, theatres and concert halls.
• A civic capital with plazas, film festivals and public squares alive with parades.
• A liveable capital with universities, creative quarters and mixed neighbourhoods.
• A green capital with parks, waterfronts, lakeside homes and cycling networks.
• This is what a modern capital city should look like.

Heart of the issue

Putrajaya is not a failure of architecture — it is a failure of purpose.

A capital city must be alive, symbolic, visible, and connected to its people. It should reflect national identity, encourage cultural exchange and stimulate economic dynamism.

Today, Putrajaya remains orderly and beautiful in small pockets, but fundamentally hollow — a polished shell without a soul, built at an estimated cost of US$8.1 billion.

Where are the strategies to generate returns on this investment — economically, culturally, socially?

That concert I witnessed in Kallang should have been staged here, in Putrajaya.

Imagine the numbers and the local economy it would generate: RM1,900 (roughly S$600) multiplied by tens of thousands of audience members, including visitors from across Asean.

Shouldn’t we harness these growing economic activities?

After all, we have the infrastructure: an international airport, express rail, MRT, low-cost airlines, hotels, great food and a welcoming audience.

We should be that host. Only then can we truly claim to be Asia’s capital of culture and connection.

 

The author can be reached at: rosli@mdsconsultancy.com