TIJ

"The six of you are all the same. All upper-middle class, all opinionated, very well-read, very opinionated, and very cute"

well, that's really not something I'm going to dispute since it's all complimentary.

"TIJ. You're at a shoot at 9 and everything is supposed to be set up, but TIJ."

My interpretation is rather different.

A jazz band singing Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Amigos Para Siempre' in a the foodcourt of a rather run down shopping mall. The guitar is a cool old man who rocks a mean solo. TIJ

A indie music joint in Blok M. The stage is a partially open-air island, the walls are draped in black fabric. Brilliant drinks for RM4 (blueberry, yoghurt, and guava love). Cigarette smoke and rain. The only people there when we enter is an old rasta dude and a younger rasta dude. The show started an hour late. TIJ.

In the old city, Batavia, kota tua. We get snuck into the former governor's house after closing hours (closing time is 4pm. TIJ) and our guide is an advocate for the restoration and promotion of the old city. On the ground floor of the governor's house there are 1 m high prison cells. There is also a shallow well which is caged up top. They used to put the worst offenders in there to die. The water only comes up to waist-level but it is leech-infested. The cannon on the grouns has a fist with the thumb inserted between the index and middle fingers as the pommel. This is equivalent to the present-day middle finger. They had a sense of humour back then too. TIJ.

Cafe Batavia in the old city is a throwback to colonial times. Fans turn slowly on the upper floor. Framed phtos of 1920s icons and advertisements line the walls. The clientele is mostly white, in their khaki pants and polo shirts and tourist cameras. TIJ.

I eat my toast spread with unsalted french butter and a smear of seville orage marmalade facing a burqa. The fabric is printed with the emblems of various Indonesian agencies and government institutions. It is suspended from the ceiling, the eye holes facing me. Birdsong accompanies breakfast. TIJ

On a Thursday afternoon in the office. In a single hour, the electricity got cut every 10-15 minutes. The airconditioning is shot for the day. Earlier in the day we came in to find the kitchen flooded. Overnight the kitchen faucet had shot through the cardboard ceiling and left water spewing everywhere. TIJ.

I do my clueless Chinese girl act in a bookstore. Tasked with finding a typical Indonesia-Chinese, I wind up talking to a MP who was on the special committee for the case I'm interested in. TIJ.

This is Jakarta

Jakarta: Take II

Although my companion set out to show me the different types of transportation available in Jakarta, as opposed to the limited few available in KL, what really stood out was the size of informal sector. Roadside vendors, ojek, jockeys (government policy states that at peak traffic hours, cars must have at least 3 passengers including the driver. ‘Jockeys’ stand by the roadside before turn offs onto roads where the police enforce this policy to provide an extra passenger or two for a small fee), bajai drivers – all opportunities to make a living. While this could be linked to a lack of government efficiency in enforcing licensing regulations, this seems to be a deliberate move to allow the informal sector to flourish, and create much-needed jobs.

The sight of people sleeping under a bridge in the middle of Jakarta is sobering and fleshes out a conversation with him about corruption and the state of the country. He argues, like many, that corruption is the biggest problem Indonesia faces but also thinks its consequences are worse now than they were under Soeharto. He claims that under the New Order, at least the corrupt kept the money they obtained inside the country and uses Tommy Soeharto as an example – he gained from the country but also gave back to it, deliberately or not, by building factories and creating employment for Indonesians. The ‘new’ corrupt are different – they take and send it overseas to Singapore, Hong Kong, everywhere else. He argues that corruption is the source of most problems here, even the most minor ones. The traffic jam caused by the bus stopped haphazard in the middle of the road to pick up passengers is in turn caused by the police’s lack of action (they have been paid off or will be, the argument goes).

He says, ‘the rich get richer, the poor are getting poorer’ – I wonder if inequality is increasing. Rising GDP figures and tax revenue figures are well and good but they say little about the distribution of income, where the wealth is going. For all of SBY’s show & tell and conviction that Indonesia is in a different place and all the shiny new buildings dotting Jakarta, a lot remains to be done to actually make this a reality for a portion of the population. SBY may be serious about tackling corruption but until there is a clean judiciary and enforced punishments, it will remain pervasive and an obstacle to ‘development’.

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Some things are familiar. The traditional market near the office is similar to wet markets/ morning markets in KL and across Southeast Asia. Shopowners are mostly ethnic Chinese (the diaspora never fail to venture into business of some sort). The easy availability of food (always around the corner if not outside the door) reminds me of Bangkok more than KL.

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I notice that bookshops in Indonesia are dominated by books published in bahasa, both original works and translations of popular and classic English books. Along the shelf with bahasa-language history books, a name pops out. One of my professors at university who specialized in Indonesian history is here, in bahasa. The fact that the majority of books are in bahasa stands out to me (and also proves to be an inconvenience for the reader seeking an English-language book on Indonesian history, Soeharto, Golkar, etc, although it also led us to a brilliant secondhand bookstore at the Jakarta Art Center). In comparison, the Malaysian publishing industry is tiny.

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The next night five of us take a bus to find dinner – ‘Nasi kucing’, so-called for the small amount of rice bundled with a tiny nugget of fish or other savoury/spicy condiment. She tells me this is student fare but it is also popular with other market segments in Jogja, depending on the location of the cart. Normally, the people at a ‘angkringan’ would be mostly strangers and they strike up conversations about politics, current events, and other topics of interest, for strangers to exchange ideas, she puts it. But today the group of us takes up the entire cart and there is no one else there when we arrive. It is only as we leave that some people come along.

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The Friday lunch hour crowd makes it impossible to hail a taxi and we board an angkot for part of the way back to the office. Our fellow passengers in the rickety bus appear to be from the middle-classes, likely on their ways back to the office after lunch.

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Civil liberties and social norms in the two countries are the main differences to the ones who have spent some time in Malaysia. One points out the park outside the office as a place where young couples like to meet – “they can date and even kiss openly here, not like in Malaysia”. Another, warning one of the researchers of what to expect in KL says “Malaysians are very scared… they have the ISA…. People are scared of one another, Bangladeshis, etc… crime is high”. This reminds me of the hotel driver I spoke to the first time I arrived in Jakarta – he observed that Malaysia was better off economically, but also mentioned that it had the ISA, something Indonesia hadn’t had since Soeharto’s era, 10 years ago. There is the underlying thought that in this sense at least, Indonesia is ahead of us.