Show Me the Money

Economies worldwide took another nosedive last week and currently seem to have been, as the old saying goes, "Flopped lower than whale shit". I doubt much will change in terms of our political and economic systems on the back of all this however. Wages in the West have been falling in real terms for the average working person for the last 30 years whilst banking heads still have the chutzpah to award themselves multimillion dollar bonuses, despite several previous crashes of our seemingly inherently unstable market system. Your average Joe has had to increasingly borrow the difference to make up the shortfall in his shrinking pay packet and put his trust in the smoke and mirrors of, in Bush-speak, the unreality based community of the world’s bumptious bankers. It's a rum do all right.


Okay, well that's the developed world, fine. Forget average Joe for a moment though and consider average Jamal, your run-of-the-mill, salt of the earth Indonesian chap (or chapess I should stress). For Jamal, every year seems like crisis year for he has rarely ever had much of a pot to micturate in.

According to the Central Statistics Agency, in 2008, 34.96 million people were living in poverty in Indonesia even though GDP had reached the highest level in the nation's history. I rather suspect that figure of 34.96 million to be a trifle on the low side and, of course, GDP is a very poor way of measuring the health of a country as it takes absolutely no account of how that money is (or in Indonesia's case isn't) distributed.

No, forget the bureaucrats in their ivory towers at the Central Statistics Agency. If you want to learn about how relative power is distributed in a strict patriarchal family you don't ask the father, you asked the mother. With this rule of thumb in mind, I thought I'd take a brief look at an average Jamal's monthly income and expenditure this week.

Now, our average Jamal (not his real name) is actually someone I know. He works a normal 9-to-5 daily shift in an office from Monday to Friday and gets paid a whopping Rp.1,800,000 or thereabouts for his pains. How average this makes him could be the subject of fierce debate, certainly there are plenty worse off than our man but let's stay with my amateur accounting for a while.

Okay, well let's look at monthly travel expenses first. Jamal gets two buses to the office every day at Rp.2500 per fare. So that's Rp.10,000 a day times 20 working days, give or take, leaving us with Rp.1,600,000 to play with. Now Mr J. stays in a cheap boarding house or kost , one of the ones consisting of chipboard partitioned rooms, the occupants of which can hear their immediate neighbors farting and moaning all night long. For this dubious privilege he plays the princely sum of Rp.800,000 per month. Leaving us bringing home bacon to the tune of Rp.800,000 (actually we should probably change the bacon metaphor to baso just to avoid any offence). Now let's take another Rp.150,000 off for mobile phone credits (a conservative estimate by my reckoning),Rp.50,000 for toiletries and birth control devices (providing our man is getting any of course) and Rp.100,000 for clothes.

Okay, so we're down to our last Rp.500,000. Now Mr J. also sends Rp.200,000 home every month to his even more breadline family in Java and spends around another Rp.200,000 on entertainment. Hmmm. We're down to Rp.100,000 already and alas, Mr. Jamal usually tries to save around this amount every month as a contribution towards his annual Lebaran trip home .

Okay good. We seem to be in a state of fiscal balance... no... hang on a moment. I've missed something out haven't I? Ah yes, food. A bit of a luxury on this salary I feel. In fact many is the time that I've wondered whether people such as Jamal that are able to photosynthesize on the sly, unable as I am to work out how they make ends meet.



And so April 9th brings an election to Indonesia. Who should a Young, ambitious, nutritionally challenged citizens such as Jamal vote for? It's hard to say isn't it? They don't seem to be a lot of class conscious agendas, mass movements of working people or party manifestoes kicking about the place. There isn't even a Green party that might be able to advise Mr J. on more advanced photosynthesis techniques.

Poor show indeed. Oh well. Are those consumption mad, elite fat cats in their BMWs any happier do you think? Perhaps not. Who is the richer: a man who has the most or the man who wants for the least? I sometimes like to take comfort in the ideas of that most inveterately miserable of all philosophers, Mr. Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, material and physical desires are a terrible thing. Our earthly desires are largely never satisfied, which is true for about 99% of us most of the time. However, the lucky 1% has it even worse, for their desires are satiated and in that satiation, Schopenhauer says, lies almost immediate and total boredom. And on that cheery note, I’ll take my leave for another week.

Riding the Gravy Train

This week finds me in rather ill health. My usual lean mean fighting machine demeanor has taken a severe battering from that familiar old local foe, the dodgy plate of rice. It could have been a fish in chili sauce, it could have been the Jengkol beans that Indonesians always laugh at me for being fond of. Experience tells me however that a rogue prawn may have been to blame, one should always fear those warung prawns. It's hard to say with any degree of accuracy without the aid of my personal proctologist, the good Doctor Schweinsteiger, last seen heading for Bangkok with a suitcase full of prophylactics.


All of this speculation is rather shutting the rest room door after the horse has farted however. Once a classic Jakartan food poisoning has commenced and you find yourself spending more time on the commode than Elvis did during his later 2 foot long peanut butter and banana sandwich period (albeit for the opposite reason) you have to be a bit proactive.

If you can drag yourself away from the smallest room long enough, then head round to your local chemist or drugstore for a plastic bag full of medicinal sweeties. My first line of attack is usually the charcoal tablets. These are popular in Indonesia and are supposed to cleanse one’s system of organic toxins. They certainly make for a colorful variation on the usual lavatory experience but I have my doubts as to their true efficacy. Rehydration salts also go into the bag although generally I swear by the restorative powers of a few bottles of Heineken which is simply packed full of essential vitamins, minerals and electrolytes. Enzyplex tablets are also worth buying and are full of good digestive enzymes that may restore some Zen calm to your tremulous bowels. A strip of mild antibiotics will knock whatever it is you've got on the head if all else fails, leaving you lemon fresh and ready for action again.

Other more traditional herbal remedies have also been recommended to me at one time or another however I rather suspect that the local manufacturers of these potions have foregone the scientific rigor of strict clinical double-blind trials. An Indonesian friend of mine once gave me some Chinese diarrhea medicine that she swore would work. However she also swore to me on a separate occasion that she once saw a man walking on the sea and a snake as big as a banana tree, so perhaps she can't be relied upon for the most reliable medical testimony.

Despite my tri-annual battle with intestinal turmoil, nothing but nothing will stop me enjoying my daily lunchtime fix of cheap Indonesian food. I'm a martyr to the stuff it would seem. My local shack, one of around 5 million in the capital, let's me eat heartily after selecting from a dozen tubs of brightly colored and above all delicious vegetable and meat dishes. Okay so the food is never refrigerated safely in these places but who needs fridges when you have a dainty little antibacterial net curtain behind the food to keep the microbes at bay.


Aside from the odd es jeruk (orange juice) that tastes like washing-up liquid, I generally can't seem to get enough of the fare on offer at these roadside palaces. I maintain that it is possible to eat pretty healthily hereto if you avoid the fried stuff and the dishes that are heavy on the coconut cream. Rice, vegetables and grilled fish or chicken plus a free colonic irrigation sessions three times a year, all for Rp.15,000 a go, who can argue with that? After a decent lunch, and if I'm not feeling violently ill already, I like to finish off with a few slices of watermelon and pineapple from the food cart outside.


In fact, it amazes me, that Western fast food franchises ever manage to get a foothold here at all but I suppose that you can always rely on the power of the aspirational consumer and her insatiable desire for a slice of Americana. It does, however, never cease to amaze me how such tasty Indonesian delights and fresh dishes manage to emerge from kitchens that look like Guatemalan prison cells after a heavy riot.

There are limits to how far I'm prepared to go in search of a cheap Indonesian meal however. Baso (Indonesian meat balls) are definitely off the menu as far as I'm concerned. These gelignite and plasticine monstrosities are, for reasons that remain unclear to me, loved with an almost sexual fervor by virtually all Indonesian females. When there's so much other appetizing stuff on offer why opt for these flaccid things? On the other hand, one is perhaps unlikely to become ill after a good Baso chomp session as I very much doubt that anything organic could live on the stuff.


Anyway, I'm going to have to draw things to a hasty conclusion for another week as nature is once again calling. And so, as smoke starts to drift up from my struggling water pump downstairs, it’s time to once more get the waters of life a flowing, open a copy of the Globe and have a damned good sit down. Will I never be set free?

By The Book

The social networking site Facebook has been in the news a lot recently. This is mostly due to privacy issues regarding the data of hundreds of millions of users. But other, more socio-psychological, issues have been raised as well. In a recent article in the Guardian, a leading neuroscientist claimed that Facebook risked infantilizing the 21st-century mind, leaving it “characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity.”

The fast action and reaction times of our Internet matrix desiring machines are making cyberspace junkies of us all. Perhaps our central nervous systems are being accelerated up to speed before we all upload our minds into a future computational “singularity,” as it has been dubbed by techno-seers, such as Ray Kurzweil.






All I know for sure is that we seem to be nearing some kind of tipping point after which we will be found spending more time communicating with people online than we do in the flesh. Sometimes, when I see a group of Jakarta teenagers sitting around a table in a cafe, frantically pushing buttons, absorbed in their own screen worlds as opposed to talking to each other, I think that this threshold has already been exceeded. The now ubiquitous “crackberry” has hugely exacerbated this.

Indonesians are sociable to a tee of course, and Facebook seems well suited to this society. In fact, this country represents Asia’s fastest growing pool of Facebook users, with a growth rate of a whopping 645 percent in the last year. My office has just blocked the site from its servers, and with good reason. The growth rate that I just mentioned is probably inversely proportional to productivity in the workplace.

While we’re on the subject though, let’s quickly map out some of the virtual topography of the land of Facebook.

Friend Requests: I always knew that my unusual name would come in handy one day and, accordingly, old school friends have been able to track me down much more easily than I have them. It is truly amazing though that old school chums that you would have never seen again for the rest of your life can now be found, contacted and then forgotten about all over again. Sociologists tell us that we can only maintain adequate relationships with around a hundred people, however some Facebook addicts have well over a thousand people on their lists.

Status Updates: This is the little box that says “Simon is…?” followed by a handy blank line for one to fill in with some kind of vapid summation of one’s current activities. I rather think though that “Simon isn’t…?” would be nearer the mark, as in, “Simon isn’t hiking up Mount Merapi, learning the clarinet or whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a topless Balinese maiden because he’s frittering his life away in front of his computer.”

Groups: People seem all too willing to convene these wacky collectives but then precious little seems to happen afterwards. Certainly not much activism or social capital seems to be generated. In fact, I take the Guardian’s point about the infantilization of the mind as there is a definite school playground feel to the comments that circulate through old FB; a feeling of arrested development and of brain cells popping by the dozen.

Profiles: What with the whole world gleefully punching every scintilla of their personal data into Facebook, there is probably little need for the Orwellian government profiling and databases that are currently being compiled in the spurious name of national security by developed nations. Last week, a huge demonstration in London was held to protest against the Gestapo Big Brother toilet that British civil liberties are currently being flushed down by its government. Perhaps though, it is inevitable that our new electronic “Utopia” will head in a direction of greater social transparency. Mind you, perhaps all is cultural. We Westerners are used to a bit of privacy, but here people simply accept that every Tom, Dick and Bambang in their kampong knows their most intimate business.

Photo Tagging: What really seems to concern Facebook users at the moment is the prospect of being tagged in an uncompromising photo by the swine that they choose to call their friends. Barack Obama’s speechwriter, the youthful Jon Favreau, was recently busted tweaking the nipple of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. (Mind you, it could have been the real HC. It’s hard to tell the difference.) Closer to home, a friend of mine was recently worried that his girlfriend would be browsing Facebook and chance upon a photo of her drunken beau in a similar situation to Favreau in a Jakarta bar. In this case, however, the victim was undeniably three dimensional. Facebook — destroying relationships since 2003.


Friendster still remains the number-one choice for Indonesian Web surfers, over 60 percent of whom have Friendster accounts. Facebook, with its superior user interface, is coming up fast on the rails however. Expect to be “poked” by your local cleric soon.

Join the Club

Browsing the Globe's online archives last week I chanced upon a recent feature entitled, Converting for Love. The piece took a look at non-Indonesians (usually males, it has to be said) who have converted to Islam in order to marry their Indonesian partners. Most of the interviewees seemed very upbeat about life and said that they didn't miss the bacon sandwiches (I'm presuming they weren't lying here).

During my time in Indonesia I have also known a fine body of men who have converted to Islam in order to marry their local lady friends. In fact, only last weekend, my recently departed ex-housemate tied the knot with his girlfriend in a traditional Islamic wedding ceremony held in Kemang.



The happy day had finally arrived for my associate however his conversion last month had irked him somewhat. The vicar down the mosque had had a 10 point checklist which he had methodically run through. The list speciously set out why Islam was the one true path and why all other religions were wrong. Hmmm. After all the boxes had been ticked, my chum was declared a member of the world's fastest-growing faith and was now free to get hitched to his live-in...er... I mean betrothed.

Mind you, that's nothing compared to the sine qua non pre-marriage conversion that another acquaintance of mine went through a couple of years back. As he entered the mosque, his bag was checked by mosque security, who joked with him, "I'm just checking to see if you've got a bomb in here." My friend shot back as quick as a flash, "I didn't know you needed one." Rather cheeky although, ultimately, cosmic karma was restored when our jokester woke up half way through his circumcision operation after being given insufficient dose of anesthetic. That'll teach him to make offensive jokes.


Fast forwarding to last weekend’s wedding though, my departed housemate's nuptials were in many respects the classically Indonesian. The bride and groom stood up on stage flanked by the in-laws and shook hands with all of their friends before traditionally dressed Ibu Ibu, sporting the kind of voluminously coiffured hairstyles that look as if they could shatter in a hard frost, attacked the buffet like vultures swooping on carrion.

Being a mixed marriage though, there were plenty of palefaces in attendance. Most of them seemed to naturally congregate, in their ill fitting Batik shirts, at the side of the hall which was serving Heineken. There they stood, juggling glasses of beer and plates of food whilst chatting jovially (for some reason there always seems to be a lack of chairs and tables at Indonesian weddings). After the formalities, proffered congratulations and photo sessions were over, we retired back to my friend's new pad for a more informal shindig.


And so married life begins from my newly converted friend with the full blessing of his new faith. Other couples who choose mixed faith marriages don't have things quite so easy in Indonesia however. Many mixed religion marriages apparently fail here. This could be down to more corporeal, cultural factors however Indonesia is a country in which mixed faith marriages seem almost doomed to failure from the off. Couples have to leave the country even to register their marriage as being of mixed faith, which perhaps doesn't give their union the most auspicious start. Couples also face rejection from both parents and the community at large and what with the country's Ulema passing increasingly batty edicts regarding yoga and smoking, this situation can’t be getting any easier. I wish they would issue an edict prohibiting displays of public bigotry and ignorance. Then they could declare a fatwa on themselves and give us all a break.

Thankfully, there are some brave pioneers who are willing to pursue this more pluralist view of marriage. Good luck to them I say. In a country that has seen more than its share of internecine religious bloodshed over the years, and a world in which ethnic boundaries are being increasingly blurred by the synaptic networks of our technology, mixed religious marriage should perhaps be a paradigm to aspire to rather than an aberration to shun.

Mixed marriage is a question asked about the future of society in this country and something that we need a good old dialectic on. Maybe Islam could be the thesis, Christianity the antithesis and the well-balanced, open-minded children of mixed religion marriage, the much-needed synthesis.

Such marriages need not throw up the kind of child rearing problems that afflicted Woody Allen in one of his gags. Woody claimed that he was an agnostic who married an atheist and consequently the two of them didn't know which religion not to bring their children up in.


The current crop of religious deniers (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al) have all noted the religious labeling and the indoctrination of children in their work. We wouldn't label a five-year-old child a Marxist or a Keynesian but we seemingly have no objection to labeling him or her Muslim, Christian or Jewish and sending him to a religious school. How about letting them grow up first and then letting them decide for themselves? Amen.

A Load of Barclays

On a global level, it's all about banking just at the moment. Obama looks set to pump the better part of $1 trillion into the gaping black hole that is the USA's imploding finances. Just thinking about a sum of money this large makes the eyes water and yet even this huge wedge may not yield much in the way of results when all is said and done. And so the moribund world economy trudges morosely onwards through the doldrums of 2009. None of this is Mr O's fault of course, bless his little, "Yes we can" monogrammed socks. The current boom/bust cycle goes all the way back to the Thatcher and Reagan era and their deregulation of the banking sector. The 80s were a decade of deeply radical politics and it was a radicalization of the right wing, rather than the left, as had been the case two decades earlier.


And so we are left with a truly evil system of privatized profit and publicized debt. $1 trillion would feed, clothe and educate the whole of the impoverished world with change to spare but... well that's enough of that for one week; I've probably been reading too much Chomsky recently.

Indonesia, of course, had its great banking crisis a decade ago, fashionably making it a whole 10 years ahead of the times rather than the usual 10 years behind them. During that crisis, the country was robbed blind by a few plutocrats and, as is happening in the West now, a whole country of 200 plus million had to pay for the venality of around 50 fat cats.

At a personal level though, using an Indonesian bank can be a fascinating, if sometimes frustrating experience, just as it can anywhere in the world. If you're looking for personal service and the illusion at least that someone cares about your account, I'd recommend joining one of the country's smaller banks (although what with the crisis, I would check that your choice of financial institution isn't about to go belly up).

At a smaller bank, everything is all smiles, the staff there may even remember your name when you walk in. "Need to make a transfer Mr. Simon?" (That Christian name thing always sweetens any pill here) "Step this way, Sir."


I also, however, have an account of the country's second-largest bank which shall remain nameless... until the next sentence. It's BCA actually. As 95% of my bank dealings are executed via a bleeping ATM machine, I find it handy to hold an account at the bank that has the largest network of said machines. You can perform any transaction you like at a good old Indonesian ‘hole-in-the-wall’ these days: pay phone, electricity, credit card and cable TV bills, make transfers, refill your mobile phone, the list goes on.

This can be a disadvantage too however. Many is the time in Jakarta that I've almost gnawed my own arm off in frustration after being in an ATM queue stood behind four or five people all wanting to do all of the above things simultaneously, the utter swine. ATM etiquette dictates that this is bad form as far as I'm concerned.

That's peanuts though compared with joining the queue inside the bank during any given lunchtime. British comedian Alexei Sayle once performed a sketch which sums up the whole Indonesian bank experience for me. Dressed in period costume as Jules Verne's fictional hero Phileas Fogg, he travels around the world in 80 days before returning to London. He then announces that he is embarking on a new mission: to the front of the bank queue in 80 days. We see him, still in 19th-century dress, sitting despondently on the carpet of his high street bank writing a letter home, "Beginning to lose hope. Maybe in another 10 days we will have passed the next little chromium pillar."

Mind you, even when you do reach the front of the queue, getting something done, without forms signed in triplicate and a list of all your primary school teachers’ maiden names, can be an arduous task.

Banking in the UK has also rubbed me up the wrong way too before I should stress. I remember once, soon after graduating, I was fined £100 for exceeding my overdraft limit for a mere four days after a check had failed to clear. Amazingly enough, after writing the manager a letter so stiff it could have been etched on a slab of concrete with a stonemason's chisel, he relented, and the fine was cancelled. Miracles really can happen you see.

I'm not sure that the same recourse would necessarily yield results here though, as being brusque, terse and otherwise chippy isn't really the Indonesian way of doing things. Mind you, this is all irrelevant anyway as the prospect of being able to overdraw a common or garden savings account at an Indonesian bank is about as likely as a state visit to the country by Benjamin Netanyahu.

And so the crisis continues apace and there’s not much comfort to be taken in the fact that we’re all millionaires in this country. See you next week and Shalom.

A Ringing in the Ears

Every now and then, I like to put myself through the pain and discomfort of watching prime-time Indonesian television for reasons that remain obscure to me. In the last couple of years my original pet love to hate, namely the epileptic camera work and endless hospitalizations of the Sinetron soap opera, has been overtaken by a new televisual bête noire. These are the endless advertisements of the genus Ketik-Reg-Spasi.


Basically, these insidious ads are aimed at people who happen to possess mobile phones, which I'm led to believe are all the rage these days. I suspect that even the half naked homeless man who paces the streets near my office with a half eaten bag of peanuts saying, "I’ve got the dolphins on my side," and picking fights with himself has a mobile phone which he uses to call Saturn on.

Anyway, such adverts basically offer ring tones, wallpaper, celebrity gossip and horoscopes to mobile users. After you've entered your Ketik-Reg-Spasi information and received your annoying jingle or picture of Justin Timberlake, a couple of thousand Rupiah gets chipped off your phone network credits (or 'pulsa' as I believe they are known in the vernacular).

Basically, such flyweight nonsense is of little interest to adults (I'm talking mental age here of course). This being the case, the main users of such services appear to be the country's teeny bopping ABG (or Anak Baru Gede, local slang for teenager). According to a recent report in the newspaper Kompas, one teenager managed to get through a staggering Rp.750,000 worth of this guff in a single month. The fact that there is money to be made in teenage dross is nothing new of course, remember The Osmonds?


Perhaps the fact that one doesn't have to open one's wallets and pay for each download creates a false sense of security in users, I don't know. All I know is that the Ketik-Reg-Spasi companies have moved in and cleaned up big time, not just here but in many other countries too.

In fact, a French friend of mine, who has been living in Jakarta for a number of years scraping by, has finally put his computer knowledge to work and has also muscled in on the teenage downloaders market. How is he doing? Well he's just moved into a pretty impressive pied a terre in Kemang. Those Rp.2000 hits really add up I guess. Good luck to him I say, let the spotty, Nokia brained twerps blow their cash on this kind of thing, it's probably less harmful than their pocket money being frittered away on Marlboro Lights and air pistols.

I'm less keen on the endless TV adverts though and the fact that when I phone people, I'm often cut off after a couple of minutes, no doubt due to my network being overloaded by frantic downloading. There is clearly no way back though; hardware, software and the wetware of our brains are being meshed ever tighter into our hyper connected, brave new goldfish bowl of a world. I don't even seem to be able to go to the bathroom for a pee these days without someone taking a picture of the act and posting it up on Facebook.

Kids and their phones ay? They should all be down the park on their bikes really shouldn't they? Oh yes, there aren't any in Jakarta, of course. Well, if you can't beat them you may as well join them. What should I try downloading today do you think?


Ring Tones. If you blow Rp.10,000 on these per month that adds up to Rp.120,000 per year. You could buy a whole CD for that and what's more not have to call yourself from your house's landline in order to listen to it. Ring tones are a particular bugbear of mine; their insidious chirpiness really sticks in my craw. An office colleague of mine had a Beyonce track on his Blackberry for a whole month recently and was receiving calls every 15 minutes. Luckily, the windows in my office don't open.

Games and Wallpaper. That'll be more 'pulsa' down the toilet then. A two inch by two inch screen hardly offers a mind-blowing gaming experience. As for wallpaper, most phones have cameras on them these days; why not take a snap of a cup of weak, milky tea. Voila, Justin Timberlake.

Celebrity News. Surely there's enough of this stuff clogging up the TV channels without one needing to download it as well. That dreaded portmanteau word,'Infotainment', as I've said before, is a bit of a misnomer as the stuff is neither informative nor entertaining. "Julia Peres has just cut her toenails." Yes. Super.


Horoscopes. Example download:"Kamu tidak cocok kerja di air, kamu cocok jadi pedagang." Translation: "You are not suited to working in water, you are suited to being a salesman." I'm feeling enlightened. “You will need to buy lots of 'pulsa' this month." Perhaps closer to the mark. Any superstitious saddo repeatedly using these standard reply astrology services deserves to not only lose a few thousand Rupiah, but also to have their head inserted into a waste disposal unit. On this matter the Islamic fundamentalists and I are as one. Who would have thought it?

There’ll be more hi-tech fun next week.

Saint Valentine Vanquished

"At the touch of love, everybody becomes a poet”, so said old man Plato way back at Western philosophy ground zero. Such expressions of amorous joy have been regrettably under attack of late though. Indonesia sure ain't Plato's Republic just at the moment. This year's Valentine's Day comes hot on the heels of the controversial new pornography law being passed by parliament. The law has again raised fears of Islamic Sharia style morality encroaching on public life.


Last year's Valentine's Day took a severe clerical mauling across the Archipelago. Ma'ruf Amien, chairman of the Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI) warned that celebrating the day was 'Haram' i.e. prohibited by Islam and insisted that the romantic holiday encouraged drunkenness and other such Western immorality. It was a case of the old Pengaulan Bebas Barat (liberal Western social norms) broken record being played again. Us Westerners invented sex of course.

Meanwhile in the Sumatran city of Bukittinggi, Deputy Mayor Ismet Amzis banned Valentine's Day in his town saying, "Young couples tend to hug and even kiss each other. This is an immoral act right?" Well, I don't think I would concur with that view Mr Amzis although you're by no means the first person to suggest that such is the case.


Sexual repression has a long and sad history and is surely one of the great driving forces of religion. Such unnatural repression causes the stifled energies of the seething id to be directed instead towards a vigorous and pious defence of chastity. Mind you, with Indonesia’s population pushing 250 million plus people, clearly an awful lot of making of the beast with two backs happens here in spite of the increasingly dogmatic religious edicts.

This business of romantic love is a curious one though. Why do we as humans frequent strip clubs or have affairs and yet make a big show of the monogamous pair bonding of marriage? Is love just an illusion, a mental phantasm that has evolved to facilitate the procreation of the species?

Darwinian evolution does in fact offer many interesting insights into human love and sexual relations and the animal kingdom offers up some interesting cases. In nature there are so called tournament species such as peacocks or seals. These species feature high levels of male aggression and males fight each other for dominance of the females (95% of the offspring are fathered by just 5% of the males). By contrast, pair bonded species, such as many kinds of birds or marmoset monkeys, mate for life and exhibit very low levels of male aggression. Interestingly, human beings possess types of genes found in both tournament and pair bonded species. Not quite monogamous and not quite polygamous we are, in scientific jargon, a tragically confused species.

Undoubtedly this confusion is behind so much of our great art, music and literature. But pulling human desire apart in purely biological terms tells us nothing about the emotional content of a full to overflowing heart. One can pull a radio apart and examine the individual components, however, if you really want to know what a radio does you turn it on of course and listen to the heavenly music being beamed magically through the ether.

Here's hoping that our inspiring artistic and social traditions of romantic love manage to transcend the rather stingy edicts of the Bukittinggi Administration. I’ll take my leave for this month with a stirring romantic quote from French aviator and author Antoine de Saint Exupery who once said that, "Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” It gets me just there I’m telling you.



PS This year's reaction to Valentine's Day (according to an article in The Globe) by the Ulema seems to be that it's haram because it's of Jewish origin. Hmmm. St. Valentine the Jew ay?