Jakarta

Day 2

Feverish about the idea of an adventure, I took on Ed’s first suggestion the very next morning. And so off we went to Kota Tua. As the cab passes through the city, the kind driver pointed out a few interesting monuments. Passing by Grand Indonesia, a huge shopping mall, we came to the famous roundabout in Jakarta – the Bundaran Hi. The 30-meter high statue shows a man and a woman holding up a bouquet of flowers in the middle of a circular fountain. It was the most beautiful structure that I came across in Jakarta and I found out later that it was erected in 1962 to welcome the athletes participating in the Asian Games. A few minutes later, the cab proudly pointed out MONAS, which is the Indonesian independence monument, an awe-inspiring 128m white tower. The glow on his face was unmistakable. As usual, I am surprised by how non-Singaporeans are always so proud of their country, whichever rung of society they belong to. It’s something that confounds me greatly. Ed then started to make small talks with the driver and I realised that he can sound super like a Malay. Strange.

So the cab slowly moves through central Jakarta, north-bound. It does not take long for one to realise the rather gradual change of scenery as the cab moves past the uptown part of Central Jakarta. As you move further away from the glitzy part, you begin to see smokier traffic, older buildings and more roadside stalls. To me, they were part of my traveller’s fascination and in a way, I know that this was what I came to see, some deviation from the over-developed Singapore that I am all so familiar with.

Another lens that filtered all that I saw in those moments was the preoccuption with my dressing. I had come to Jakarta not fully knowing how conservative the Muslims in this part of the world are as such, I brought tonnes of slightly deeper v-shaped sleeveless tops, and I freaked out quite a bit when I noticed how most females on the streets were dressed rather modestly. I think I did not see any in skirts  and none had plunging necklines like mine. Instinctively, I pulled my jacket over my chest to cover the exposed area – my first brush with cultural conformity in Jakarta. I kept recounting all the scary oppressive things that I have heard or seen about muslim societies. The image of the young Iranian protagonist being ‘arrested’ by fashion/ religious police in Persepolis was one recurring imagery.

When we reached Kota Tua, that began our first moment of ‘adventure’. The cab driver dropped us off on the side of the road and told us that the museums are roughly in ‘that direction’. It was nice but not terribly helpful. And so we floundered on. I felt uneasy because I felt like I dropped into a different world where people seem to hail from such different living circumstances. Everyone seems to be looking at me, or perhaps I was imagining it because I feel so different.

Ed and I were supposed to go to Cafe Batavia, the ‘must-go’ restaurant in every guide. Truth is, it’s very over rated. Other than the fact that you get to see really tall teak window frames, there was pretty much very little about the place. There were tonnes of hollywood movie star artistes, but then and again, it’s that kind of old-school 1930 American feel that any restaurant could have easily fabricated. The food was definitely lacklustre too. I ordered Javanese coffee which they served with coffee beans residue floating atop the coffee. It makes it really hard to drink and scratches my throat every time I take a sip.  In short, life is full of liars, and travel guides writers are one of them.

After our lunch, we learnt much to our horrors that all the museums are closed because it is a national holiday. Then, much to our surprise, we saw teenagers getting into the museums and peering out from the windows. I have no idea how a closed museum can be opened to random adolescents. It jars a little with the rule-abiding Singaporean in me. Ed refuse to explore this area near Cafe Batavia that one of the young servers recommended us because it did not seem near enough. Although I was scared, I was a little miffed too. Risk comes with an adventure and I was very ready to take some risk. Regardless, we passed through some back alleys before we jettisoned the plan and while we were there, I reminisced about my childhood. I remember that as late as the late 1980s, there were many of such shopless stalls around selling seemingly fashionless apparels. In a way, it really makes me grateful to the government. For all their failings, I really remembered the transformation that Singapore went through in the 90s.

Returning to the main square, we simply loitered aimlessly around. Looking carelessly at the handicraft stalls and warongs (roadside stalls) on the fringe of the square, time passed rather quickly. It’s interesting to look at how people there can spend the whole day on a square like this, cycling, taking pictures, moving from stalls to stalls. The pace of life is remarkably different. It makes me think a lot about childhood, how the day just revolve around simple places, like playgrounds and neighborhoods. Apparently, some people will always have such uncomplicated afternoons.

Near evening, a performance was being staged in one corner of the square

A strange get-away

Day 1

After four and a half year of keeping to the NUS school routine, I was pretty excited to steal some time away and dump myself in a country that I actually know really little about. I wasn’t sure what to expect because my mind was clouded with all kinds of disconnected impressions superimposed onto one another. The impressions were so varied that I wasn’t even able to determine exactly how developed Jakarta would be.

Transiting from Changi Airport to Jakarta Soerkan Arport, I was jolted out of my Singaporean skin. As the plane was leaving Singapore, I saw how millions specks of light dotted the island below but as the plane was descending at the Soerkan Airport, I was a little taken aback by how there were large swathes of land without light. After getting off the plane, I realized that the airport was really old and the signage was pretty poor. I only got out alive to the luggage belt because I followed behind this Indonesian guy who sat next to me on plane and whom I knew was able to speak English.

While waiting for the luggage, I saw this toilet cleaner go up quietly to this middle-age woman and ask if she wants to buy phonecards from him. I was rather amazed because I have never seen moonlighting under the sun before, and I’m surprised by how all his colleagues saw and just jokingly chided him. It was my first face to face encounter with unorthodox job ethics.

Having every single person speaking Bahasa Indonesia gives me a complete understanding of how it felt like to be a ‘Chinese island in a Malay sea’ – lost in translation. Being alone accentuates the feeling of unfamiliarity as I feel especially attentive to every single fluctuation in people’s tone and expression. The rather dilapidated airport only serves to further bring out the feelings of being alienated because it was in such a sharp contrast to airports that I previously know.

After collecting the luggage, I saw Ed’s message to ask me to meet him at Gate 2E. As if I know where is Gate 2E. At that moment, I was really grateful that Jia suggested picking up Malay. So, with what limited vocabulary I have, I pieced together a basic question – “Abang, dimanakah pintu dua E?” (Brother, where is Gate 2E?) and approached the nearest friendliest looking person in sight. He actually understood my gibberish, and as always, it’s a tear-jerking experience to have people understand you when you’re actually babbling. Once I met Ed, things became less terrifying. So, it’s rather interesting how having a basic understanding with another human being mediates the experience of being in a very foreign environment.

And Ed bought me yam milktea from Quickly. That was really quite a fascinating decision because for YEARS, I have pondered over the fate of Quickly bubbletea. I spend about three long conversations with people discussing about the wax and abrupt wane of Quickly. I thought it got wiped out by the cheaper Sweettalk and what have you and it was a lesson in how quality does not matter where price-sensitve consumers fail to appreciate the differentiation. So, after all my idle musings all these years, I am a little offended by how it has struck out a living elsewhere as I was lamenting needlessly. It reminds me how weird life is and how one’s reality is jarred by Nassim Taleb’s Black Swans all the time, where a single event can have a high impact on one’s understanding reality.

On the car ride back to the hotel, I was pretty surprised by how roads everywhere look alike and how there were always comforting big names like Starbucks and Prudential around. Modernization and globalization has a way of introducing comfort into an international traveller’s life. Here’s the view from Ed’s apartment:

The last place to find jokes

Law textbooks are deceptively boring; within those dense pages of text are amazingly entertaining instances of human hilarities.

In Sayer v Harlow UDC, the plaintiff found herself locked up in a public toilet. in trying to climb over the top of the door, she stepped on a toilet roll which ‘true to its mechanical requirement, rotated’. She fell and injured herself. The court held that the defendants were liable for the defective lock, but that the plaintiff contributed to her injury and hence her damages were reduced by 25 percent.

 

Advertising

Joan Wanamaker, the US department store magnate, once said, ‘I know that half of my advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half. I spent $2million for advertising, I don’t know whether that is half enough or twice too much.’

Time to stop being a hypocrite

I have a new resolution and that is to be a vegetarian. I want to condemn the above instances of animal torture but to do that I got to stop being a hypocritical omnivore who exercises double standard. The modern industrial Fordist production of food has got to be the most grotesque development of mankind. And it’s shocking how one can benefit so nonchalantly from another’s pain. Absolutely disgusting.

Tax stories can be funny too!

Tax policymakers have thus far concluded for good reasons that taxes that everyone pays are fiscally superior to narrow or focused taxes on certain defined goods or social groups. Broad based taxes can generate huge revenues at low rates. The more focused a tax, that is, the narrower is base, the higher the rates have to be to generate sufficient revenues to justify the administrative expensive and political controversy associated with it. In addition, if tax rates are very high, there are strong incentives for taxpayers to limit the kind of activity or behaviour that evokes the tax. In eighteenth century England, for example, a tax on windows was seen as a reasonable and efficient way to generate revenues: people with many windows in their homes had more money to tax than those with few or no windows. It was also easy for the taxman to count windows and assess the tax due. But as the rates of this tax grew, so did the propensity of homeowners to fill the window openings with bricks. Even today in England, one can see many large, dark manor houses with bricks where there once were windows. – Steinmo

Moon

Sometimes I feel that the timeline of my life can be broadly broken down into thematic sections. The year of 2008 was one that was spent largely on figuring out why one ought to be ethical or moral when there may or may not be such a thing as divine retribution. In that patchwork of movies, momentary inspirations and misadventures, I concluded that morals and ethics preserve our sanctity and humanity. They exist to keep society from turning on itself and to prevent individuals from using each other as a means to an end. There is nothing inherently wrong about anybody’s ’immoral’ or ‘unethical’ action because we would be hardpressed to find a single, absolute standard to measure them. Nevertheless, the best gauge of what could be a desirable set of law for all of humanity would be one where everyone do not mind being subjected to at any one time. It would be like the idealistic Kantian model of categorical imperative.

 

Thus far, 2009 seems to be a year where I struggle to define what is to be human.  And the latest addition to the list of influences is Duncan Jones latest creation ‘Moon’. Here’s quoting from user ‘freemantle’ on the IMDB website about what the film is about:

 

In Duncan Jones’ vision of the future, the world’s energy needs are solved by mining the moon for helium-3 which can be used for nuclear fusion. Living on the dark side of the moon is Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who is coming to the end of a 3 year contract. He has lived in isolation, with only GERTY (Kevin Spacey), a robot who is programmed to serve him. His only contact from the outside world is video messages from his wife (Dominique McElligott) and the company. When one of the mining machines suffers some damage Sam goes out to fix it. However, after seeing images he crashes and wakes up after in the infirmary. GERTY tells Sam he is under orders no to let out the base and he has to trick the robot before being allowed out. In the open spaces of the moon Sam finds another version of himself. Both falls quickly into conflict, both arguing they are the real Sam and the other is a clone. But both also know something wider and darker is happening and they need to solve it before a rescue team arrive.

 

‘Moon’ in 2009 reminds me a lot of what ‘Little Children’ had been to me in 2008 – a profound experience that really pushes me to understand what exactly is meant by humanity/morality. Just as how Little Children leads the audience to slowly give concession as to what is morally permissible, Moon carefully leads the audience to empathise with the clones of sam rockwell. It was such a natural progression that when the audience realise the truth about the situation, they struggle to really see them as anything less than human. Even GERTY, the AI robot which detects impeccably minor fluctuations sam’s emotions and which volunteered to violate protocols on a few occasion so as to help sam, causes serious dissonance. If artificial intelligence has been perfected to such an extent where it can fully mimick the entire spectrum of human emotions and respond empathetically to a follow human being, can we really say that it is just a man-made robot? How is it so different from us, whose mechanisms of emotions and experience is much less understood than a robot?

 

Of late, I realised that I’m a science-fiction convert. Questions about humanity future has never been more poignantly explored than in good sci-fi.

Grouses

It’s sitting like that by the window in the dead of the night, wine-intoxicated, that allows me to come to terms with myself. And the strength and frailities within. It’s on a nights like that that truly makes me realise what it means to be truly alive, to be nothing but a mind that cherishes dreams and memories alike, that thinks and laments concurrently, that maddening stream of thoughts that occupies the concsiousness, that surges forth with a rapidity that is hard to capture.

In my half-dazed mode, I’m trying to watch a movie – “10 Items or Less”. It could be that I’m too drunk, or it could be that it is making very poignant observations about life. Either case, I am thinking lots about how chanced encounters with certain people sometimes jolt one into thinking about one’s life. And considering how random such fleeting encounters may be, isn’t it amazing how our lives are absolutely governed by exceedingly random events?

I used to think that ‘Burn After Reading’ was a mega-cast with a stupid plot, but more than any movie I’ve watched, it kept resurfacing as a constant reminder of how absolutely senseless lives can be sometimes. The amazing, amazing bizarreness of it all. It’s like watching the random documentary in IMAX yesterday. It wasn’t much but just looking at Van Gogh’s paintings and his debilitating zeal for capturing everything that he sees with his glorious palette moved me so much that I was on the verge of tears. I thought it was so silly but the tears just wouldn’t stop welling. I kept thinking, how would life be like if we live with a passion that consumes us? How would it be like to put all of yourself into ONE thing, one thing that makes you burn so hard for it?

Cross-country training with Zehnder was the nearest I ever came to a passion. Those were the days when I would have just one uncompromising goal. One goal to centre all of my life around. Although it was the same terrain over and over again, somehow, with the years, it seemed like it could be a perfectible art. With every single run, you knew exactly when to charge and when to take it slow. It’s like you know when to boost your opponent’s morale and when to break their strides. I still remember how it was like in the final Nationals, it was almost like a song. The whole run was like a song…

Then and Now II

To start with, as the leader of both the PAP and the Opposition, Lee Kuan Yew was obviously an ardent defender of democracy and workers’ rights. T.J.S. George recorded such an image in his books:

… a knight-errant of democracy and socialism… Lee could not have been … other than a champion of the oppressed. His time until then had been taken up in defence of workers and students, in opposition to colonialism. He was an advocate of popular causes, a progressive… a liberal whose conscience was sensitive to the slightest sign of injustice around him… Almost any speech he made in the Assembly between 1955 and 1959 could go straight into the liberal democrat’s bedside book-shelf.

A look at the Legislative recods of the time would illustrate Lee’s philosophical bent and also his open criticisms against the government on what he saw as its undemocratic practices. During the First Legislative Assembly sitting on 4 October 1956, this was what Lee charged of the government:

You take over the organisation … the government machinery, the instruments of policy, the administration, the police, broadcasting and all the ‘gimmicks’ of a modern colonial state. Then you use your machinery with the connivance and concurrence of you colonial masters against rival organisations… All you have to do is dissolve organisations and societies and banish or detain the key political workers in these societies… Then an intimidated Press … and the govenrment-controlled radio together can regularly sing your praises and slowly and steadily people are made to forget the evil things that have already been done. Or if these thigns are referred to again, they are conveniently distorted, and distorted with impunity, because there will be no opposition to contadict it… But if we say that we believe in democracy, if we say that the fabric of a democratic society is one which allows for the free play of ideas … then, in the name of all the gods … give that free play a chance to work within the constitutional framework…

–

Although LKY had issues with the communist faction in his party, he said this of them:

They are not crooks or opportunists. These are men with great resolve, dedicated to the communist revolution … many are prepared to pay the price… in terms of personal freedom and sacrifice.

I think the quote captures how the clash of ideology is sometimes less of political opportunism but more of a dedicated belief in what works best

Heaven and Hell

Tonight, my reader, I would like to talk about a central conundrum in Christianity – the question of heaven and hell.

As a Christian, the most difficult question that I need to ask myself is – ‘why hell?’ If I were to look at the Old Testament God I would be able to comprehend, for the old God is portrayed as a fear-inspiring, jealous and vengeful God. Even though he seems arbitrary in his issuance of the concept of ‘justice’ I feel more amicable towards this plain, realist concept of ‘might is right’ than the seemingly unaccounted for penalty of death in the New Testament.

If Christ was so forgiving even in his last moment towards the Roman guards who crucified, speared and humiliated him – “Father, please forgive them for they do not know what they are doing,” when they have obviously witnessed and defiled Him, why does he turned away from trillions of people who might have simply not given much thought to his Words or have rejected Him based on imperfect information? I always believed that God gave us a brain and thus we should use it. Since, the concept of God is obviously not falsifiable in any conceivable way, rational people (a breed whom he created along with the less rational ones) who have faith in science (which is but one of the many ways which allow us to study the wonder of his creation) would naturally conclude that it is a futile search and conclude at best that they do not know. If there were no compelling reasons to believe, other than a personal experience with God that follows after believing, how do rational people who have not believed convince themselves to do so?

The best explanation that I have heard in defense of the separation of believers and non-believers states that non-believers who rejected God would not delight in His presence and hence, it might be tormentous to put them in Heaven with God, for an expansive eternity. I buy that argument because I cannot imagine myself worshipping somebody whose cause I do not believe and whose rule I abhor. Nevertheless, akin to societies on earth, people do not always have to love their governments for them to want to obey the laws and for them to want to live in relative peace and comfort. I am pretty sure that there are tonnes of people who would prefer a long-lived tyrant to a lifetime of imprisonment in the depths of licking flames. Even if people would prefer to opt out of bible studies, Everyday (as opposed to Sunday) school and thanksgiving, I do not necessarily think that they have opted for hell by default. I think exclusion in the form of confinement or neglect would suffice as a form of segregation. Is there a need to really punish them FOREVER by placing them in the throes of licking flames and allowing their bones to be burned to an ashen white?

When I imagine almost 70% of the people whom I love burning in Hell for their failure to accept a set of belief that is pockmarked by unintelligible reasons, unbelievable crimes and unfathomable laws, I cannot will myself to accept that this belief issues the best possible Truth. I would choose to burn in Hell than serve a God who burns people I love endlessly because they have failed to love Him. A Father who professes to love me unconditionally and beyond ways I can comprehend, would find it impossible to burn the people whom I love more dearly than myself and yet be able to profess that at the very same time. It is a blatent double-think that prescribes two mutually exclusive conditions that ought not exist simultaneously under any logical circumstances. But perhaps, God does not use logic and he most definitely does not need to, he has other tools and rules and way of thinking that is higher than ours. Christianity is a rounded concept, and whenever you reach a logical dead-end like this, you only have one way out and that is called ‘the leap of faith’. The Leap requires that you drop your logical armament and proceed with an unassailable blind faith that would shield you against any atheist corruption. And herein lies another manifestation of my eternal antagonistic selves. I have leapt across the abyss of reason and yet as I walk on I realised that a boulder tied to me with an infinitely long rope has fallen off into the bottomless abyss. Amen.