Sherman Tank

Recently I was lucky/unlucky enough (delete as your own prejudices dictate) to attend an exhibition of modern paintings, installations and objets d'art at the National Gallery. The exhibition, entitled Latitudes in Transit, showcased the work of up and coming Indonesian and Mexican female artists.

In the pre-recession economic good times, as elsewhere in the world, Indonesia's art scene became, over the last decade, the domain of wealthy dilettantes and businessmen collectors. Riches awaited artists who could hype their weird and wacky efforts to levels not seen since nouveau riche former enfant terrible (lots of French today) Damien Hirst first started slicing up farmyard livestock and flogging the pieces for millions of dollars a pop.

The art market in Indonesia has become so commoditized and overlaid with late capital's reductive media hyped numbers game that it can be hard to get a handle on what a given artist is actually trying to say beyond, "Make me rich." Jakarta's deracinated population is generally not very arty and, unlike the rest of the country, seem to share only a culture of common materiality.

The modern visual arts may indeed be in a parlous condition but things weren't much different previously in Indonesia. Suharto's New Order weeded out those involved in the arts deemed subversive and dangerous (such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer) leaving local art as a pretty but ultimately banal and toothless exercise in tourist sponsored heritage culture, shorn of sweat, dirt, vitality and any broader social significance.

Wandering around modern art galleries always gives me the willies however. I mean, I can appreciate the skill needed to compose a nice tune or to be able to dab a bit of paint into a realistic portrayal of a scene, but the conceptual stuff always finds me seriously conflicted and ambivalent. Is it genius or rubbish? Surely I could have done that? Or could I? Or does that even matter?

I remember visiting an exhibition of modern art with a friend back home in London during my teenage years. At one point we came across a piece simply called Blankets by somebody called Barry Flanagan. The 'installation' as I believe these things are called in the parlance, consisted of a pile of blankets... and that was it. A puckish commentary on the nanny state or a load of rubbish? Whatever, we had great fun imagining Mr Flanagan sending a postcard to the Arts Council from the Bahamas. "Dear Arts Council, thank you for the £20,000, wish you were here, love Barry."



Later in the same exhibition we found ourselves musing on what appeared to be another installation piece, a metal abstract shape with wheels on the bottom containing familiar household products. Alas our pretentious critiques were brought back down to earth when one of the cleaners entered stage left and wheeled her trolley, the artwork in question, away to do some polishing elsewhere in the gallery.

Back to Latitudes in Transit though and the rubbish/genius dichotomy. I felt, as I wandered around, as if I had a little devil and angel on each shoulder like in the cartoons, each trying to persuade me of their point of view. My fictional angel was called Agus Sudharmono, Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Airlangga University in Yogyakarta and the demonic character hovering over my other shoulder was simply called Bambang, a part-time bakso salesman from North Jakarta.



On to the first piece then, My Pink Engagement by Tiarma Sirait. Over to Pak Agus first: "Yes, to me this image of a bride in a pink dress with her back turned to us works on several levels, the bride’s loose and uncut hair is simultaneously a symbol of promiscuity and virginity. The use of textiles in this piece satirizes the hyperbole of the fashion world and the way that it emasculates the female subject."

Right on. And Bambang? Your thoughts? "Lord Allah Almighty! This is like a birthday card but backwards. You have to be an artist to do this stuff? I could have done that in a couple of hours. My eight-year-old son has done better stuff in his school art class."


Okay we'll try another one, To Breed or Not to Breed by Lie Fhung. Agus? "These mannequins dangling from thin wires at first look suicidal. However the lifelike foetus in the mother's womb is essentially an affirmation. Overall, the surreal contrast reflects a woman's feelings of being torn between wanting a baby and also wanting to retain her freedom."



And Bambang? "Jesus H. Akbar! Do they let kids see this? That's not right, I've a good mind to write a very stiff letter to the newspaper, probably on cardboard or something."

And that was just the start. I left the gallery as confused and conflicted as ever. Is it a sign of progress that Indonesian artists are now as witheringly pretentious as those on the international scene or is this a genuine aesthetic movement that will inspire an intellectual revolution in the masses? Is avant-garde, as John Lennon once noted, merely the French word for bullshit? Well, I may not know about art but I know what I like.

Touch Me I'm Sikh

Religion has rather depressingly proved to be a contentious issue in this year's presidential election, and for all the wrong reasons. Candidates' wives have been criticized for flagrantly displaying their leonine locks (RIP Farrah Fawcett). Possibly the reason these ladies don't wear headscarves is linked to the reason that their husbands don't have four wives apiece, but I wouldn't want to speculate too wildly on this.

Meanwhile, precious little has been said about repealing both the Draconian anti-pornography law and the repressive Sharia laws that have been enforced in some of Indonesia's autonomous provinces and which make religious minorities feel like second-class citizens in their own country. The fate of the much persecuted Armadiyah sect, now banned by presidential decree, was also inevitably not raised during the simply super presidential debates which otherwise succeeded admirably in whipping me up into a coma.

I thought I'd explore the arcane world of minority religion for myself this week and duly headed up to the busy pedestrianized shopping area of Pasar Baru. I strolled a few hundred meters round the back of the main shopping area until I reached Jakarta's very own Sikh Temple.



I remove my shoes and socks, as is the Sikh custom, washed my feet clean of worms and parasites and headed inside. In the entrance passage, I came across a photo of India's current and first ever Sikh Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, shaking hands with President SBY. I wonder what those two said to each other. Indonesia does in fact have a well-known Sikh politician, Mr HS Dillon, who has been a member of the government for many years and whose turban is easy to spot in newspaper pictures. Mr Dillon has also, commendably, been an outspoken critic of corruption in Indonesia.



Like Indonesia, India has had its share of religious conflagrations of course, despite the best attempts of Mr. Gandhi to unite it across nationalist lines. Mr. Nehru also famously strolled along the beach at Sanur in Bali many years ago with Mr. Sukarno and was so enchanted he described the place as, "The morning of the world". Similar reactions may not have been forthcoming if he had been just down the road in Legian circa 2009 but who knows?



Inside the temple, I came across a bearded, robed Indian sitting cross-legged playing some Raga style drones on his harmonium and chanting, a classic image of subcontinental mysticism. I introduced myself and found out that his name was Napinda Singh, a Sikh guru from the Punjab, the home of Sikhism. Napinda had only been in Jakarta a mere three months. He told me that there were between 200 and 300 Sikh families in town. There are a fair number of Indians: Sikh, Hindu and Muslim, in Jakarta in fact, although traditionally Medan has housed Indonesia's largest population of Indians.

My main Indonesian/Indian connection is as a disciple of Indian food. Being from the UK, I'm always trying to source the stuff out wherever I go. I've also tried feeding Indian food to Indonesians over the years with frankly mixed results. Indonesia is a country that contains many historical echoes of India however, small though the Indian Diaspora may be here. Indonesia's traditional culture, as well as its social stratifications, reflect Indian roots and even people's names are often a strange fusion of Arabic Islam and Hindu Indian Sanskrit (Fatimah Laxmi, Mohammed Aditya, etc).



Back at the temple, my new friend Napinda continued with a little more acid rock harmonium drone before lighting some incense sticks. I was beginning to feel like John Lennon in India circa 1966. “Oh wise one, I search the truth, are you really sure we should let Ringo sing Octopus's Garden?” I don't know if the NU's latest ludicrous fundamentalist edict banning Yoga was affecting our man. Frankly, he looked as if he'd feel more at home lying down on a few thousand nails.

Napinda was a gracious host however and tried to outline the central tenets of the Sikh faith to me through his broken English. He told me that Sikhs pray at 5am and 6am and then eat. The temple is open to anyone and even provides free tea and curry to those who turn up on a Sunday morning between 8am and 11am. That's an offer good enough to convert me for life.

He went on to sagely explain that the Sikh philosophy says that if you concentrate, think, meditate and study, then you can obtain knowledge of God, of real life and of love. This knowledge, he continued, cannot be obtained through idle gossip and chit chat. This seemed to me a worthy ideal to aspire to and I consequently didn't ask the good Mr. Napinda whether he had a Facebook account.



I bid my host farewell and headed back out into the dingy boulevards of Pasar Baru. It would be nice if Indonesia could truly live up to its motto of unity in diversity and put sectarian conflict side. If we know anything about God, which I'm not sure we do, but if we know anything about the chap, it's that he loves diversity, otherwise he wouldn't have created so many millions of wildly differing types of life on the planet.

Peace be upon you all, Shalome.

All the Fun of the Fair

Last weekend, I embarked on an epic journey across town in order to take in the traditional Jakarta fair which runs every summer. Fairs and carnivals have historically been the time during which the normal social order is anarchically inverted and the great unwashed masses sublimate their social tensions in a riot of music and japery.

In keeping with the subversive spirit of this great tradition, Jakarta Fair offers the city's citizens respite from the intellectual impoverishment of their mall centered lives by giving them... more shopping. That's pretty much all you get at Jakarta Fair aside from a stream of spandex clad Dangdut bimbettes caterwauling at a volume high enough to make the cellulite in their thighs oscillate.



This is where we are though, the shopping terminus of history, where the ultimate life goal is to die the sexiest 110-year-old on the block, doing three hours a day on Stairmaster in a huge mansion in L.A. whilst frantically surfing the net for porn and polishing a vast fleet of sports cars. At least people getting blown up in Iraq have some kind of life story narrative to tell beyond endlessly traversing the tedious, closed Moebius strip of consumer narcissism but don't get me started. Suffice to say that if the self is indeed, in 2009, under siege, then Jakarta Fair's battlements are looking decidedly ragged.

However, if all needs are economic needs, as late capitalism predicates, then I thought that I may as well fill my cup to overflowing down at the JF. The place was positively heaving with Sunday punters as I entered with my wallet bulging. As I strolled around the stalls, the consumer hegemony started to lull me into docility and I even saw a few things worth picking up, aside from the lovely young ladies manning the various stalls of course. Here's my Which guide roundup of the top (and bottom) products making a splash this year (coughs, clears throat).

The Light Bulb Changing Stick


This handy gizmo consists of a long broom handle with some plastic grabbing spokes on the end. Simply push the spokes around the light bulb on your high ceiling and unscrew. Guaranteed to prevent one from falling off the perch as it were (a la Michael Jackson). It's a boon!

The Air-Conditioner Water Heating Unit


This is basically a water tank that hooks up to the external unit of your AC and taps the wasted heat. Commendably green, but would you actually get enough hot water for a nice shower before hell freezes over?

The Aquamaster Water Purification System


After running the gauntlet of electric massage machines that looked like something from Kafka's In the Penal Colony, I came across something called a reverse osmosis drinking water system that was being demonstrated by an enthusiastic chap wolfing down water that had previously been the colour of a muddy swamp. Rather him than me and the real proof of this filtration system's efficacy would surely have involved me checking the condition of his underpants several hours later. Suffice to say that I didn't see him being wheeled out on a stretcher when I left.

The Blood Glucose Test Meter

What with the offspring of the city's well-to-do increasingly looking as if they've been blown up with air hoses, perhaps this little device could prove useful. Those on the Baskin-Robbins diet can pop one of these little gizmos in their pockets and monitor the moment when the cumulative effect of a metric ton of doughnuts pushes them into a hypoglycemic coma.

The Electric Shock Mobile Phone

Obviously you’re more likely to zap yourself with one of these babies than any criminal types. I was thinking though that some kind of Blackberry version of this could be used by psychiatrists as aversion therapy for finger twitching patients who’ve gone too far and crossed over totally into techno-autism land.


Xamthone Mangosteen Skin Juice

This bottle of snake oil hokum promises to do everything from actually repairing your DNA (in fact the human body can already do that) to easing the symptoms of chronic diseases. At Rp.225,000 per small bottle though you could buy several kilos of real Mangosteens, put the skins in a blender and still have change left over for the busway home. Marketing fail.

Magic Power Antiseptic Wet Tissue for Sensitive Area (for Men Only)

Now this one really caught my eye. Billed, "The sweetest thing in a tissue," (they obviously haven't been in my bedroom) the girls dispensing this innovative new product took time out to explain the whole "Magic Power" deal to me. Basically a moist towelette soaked in aftershave, one simply wipes the said item over the family jewels before that intimate moment for some terrific vibes. According to the packet, the Magic Power Wipe will provide you with moisturizer, aromatherapy, longer satisfaction, maximum protection and lubricant sensation gel. According to the leaflets there are no side-effects although I reckon that a nasty dose of something could possibly be one if you believe that soaking your genitals in aftershave is going to afford you, "Maximum protection". I purchased a gross of the things and headed for the door. Hopefully I'll be back next week.

Adventures in Mega Reality

Last week's first televised Debat Capres (Presidential Candidates' Debate) proved to be a bit of a damp squib in many people’s opinions. Aside from Mega's hopes for a, "Bouncy nation," an aspiration I'm sure most red-blooded males can get behind, the debate was, by contrast, pancake flat and frankly not even a debate at all in any commonly accepted sense of the word. Moreover, every five minutes of verbatim regurgitated and almost identical political platitudes came accompanied by about ten minutes of adverts.



Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the cultural malaise that has pretty much erased all political and ideological differences in the West has now arrived in Indonesia. According to the great philosopher of our technologically advanced, information overloaded age, Jean Baudrillard, our great traditions of politics and philosophy have now passed over into the realms of advertising, movies, television and the spectacle and are now mere simulations of their former selves.

In keeping with Baudrillard's concept of hyper-reality (more real than real) SBY, hovering around the 62 percent mark on the digital ticker at the bottom of the screen during the 'debate', is seemingly popular for being popular. Like Madonna and Ronald Reagan before him, SBY's very popularity, rather than anything especially substantive, is popular.

Mega, on the other hand, who often comes across as if the stick up her posterior has got to stick up its posterior, is also a postmodern dream. The daughter of Indonesia's founding president often seems as insubstantial as a hologram, paradigmatically real but not much else, a vacant nationalistic digital simulation constituted entirely by the rose tinted, reflected glow of her father.



Meanwhile, in the TV studio, the usual failing microphones and missed cues are the only thing that disrupts the seamlessly banal flow of images, adverts and cliches and symbolize the still remaining vestiges of the failing world outside and the fact that real people still sleep in the cracks of the pavements of our new PR designed, digital wrap around, hyper-real simulation of the Indonesian body politic. Just text us your vote, and democracy will flourish.

After the presidential debate, I thought that I'd also hit the pavements in order to inject a much-needed dose of real reality into my election coverage. I didn't want to end up like Baudrillard himself who, during the first Gulf war, refused an offer to travel to Iraq to cover events. Remaining true to his postmodern theories, he instead chose to file his reports from his Paris flat, sitting in front of his CNN filled TV screen where, "The war really happened."




No, it was time to sally forth to Mega and Prabowo's media centre, handily located in the Prapanca area in an ex-Padang restaurant that I often used to frequent. Outside, the unlikely pairing of Mega and Prabowo, my least favorite presidential ticket, beamed down benignly from a huge banner.


I entered and received a warm welcome from the assembled cadres. After being presented with stickers, a campaign magazine and even a book outlining Prabowo's various policies, I thought I'd float a few questions.

"Is Mega a CGI hologram?"
"No, no Mister!"
"Well, has she ever been here?"
"Er...no Mister, she's very busy on the campaign trail."
"Hmmm. Interesting. So you've never seen her in the flesh as such?"
“No. But please Mister, have a free glass of Aqua!"
“Most kind, so what would you say to allegations leveled at Prabowo, namely that he was involved in the kidnapping of student activists a decade ago?"
"That's just a political smear I think. Nothing was ever proved. I believe that Prabowo will help Indonesia's poorest citizens."

Inevitably, however, my political probing was diverted onto other matters.
"You’re English Mr. yes?"
"Yes, indeed."
"You know David Beckham?"
"Erm... I'm aware of his work."
Yes, the 'Hello Mister' wall had gone up and serious debate was now off the agenda down at the Mega Pro Media Centre. After a few matey photos, I bid farewell to the staff, saddled up my trusty mountain bicycle and headed off into the sunset of a bright new Indonesian future.

Later, leafing through my free copy of Prabowo's Tani Merdeka magazine, with its pictures of noble farmers in the fields and attacks on laissez-faire, neoliberal capitalism (one of the buzzwords of this election) I couldn't help marveling at our man’s audacious political rebirth. Prabowo, 1.7 trillion rupiah in the bank, accused of blazing a trail of destruction from East Timor all the way to Jakarta and formally banned from entering the US, has reinvented himself as Indonesia's very own Mahatma Gandhi: agrarian champion and friend of the great unwashed.

There's even a cartoon for children stapled into the magazine’s centre, a short morality skit on the evils of money politics entering a student election. Despite offering his fellow students bribes of baso and mie ayam, the Eric Cartman-esque Tambun loses the cartoon class election to young Boni. A laudable lesson indeed, although how the huge amounts of money that Prabowo's pumping into his credulity stretching campaign squares with this cautionary tale I don't know. And now a word from our sponsors.

Heidi High

Recently, I had the pleasure of ascending Gunung Gede, one of Indonesia's many still smoking volcanoes, with a group of sunny masochists called Java Lava. Gede lies up near Puncak and can be reached via the beautiful botanical gardens at Cibodas.



Around 30 of us palefaces were embarking on a three day hike, accompanied by an almost equal number of local porters. These tree trunk legged mountain warriors had the unenviable task of heaving our huge backpacks up the mountain along with their own gear, leaving us Lillywhite bules unencumbered. Our Javanese Sherpas loaded themselves up like pack mules in some kind of symbolic re-enactment of the colonial yoke and set off at a cracking pace.



Several young children from the city's various international schools were also making the ascent and inevitably proved more up to the task than the adults. These fresh limbed, light bodied youngsters were able to easily win the battle against the unremitting cruelty of gravity and quickly scaled the summit before bounding halfway back down again to regale their huffing and puffing parents.



Fuelled only by a diet of Cadbury's chocolate and vitamin packed cigarettes, I made it to our first campsite just as dusk was falling. The site was set into the stunning forest on the side of the mountain, just above some steaming hot springs. Turning my attention from the beautiful scenery to more pedestrian matters, I pitched my tent, a pathetically flimsy one-man job that I covered with a huge, waterproof plastic sheet of the kind used in roadside food stalls. I'd bought this lifesaving piece of plastic down the market the week before for a mere Rp.30,000.


After my tent had endured the derision of some of the hardier, hiking boot and moustache clad members of the group, I cooked myself a gourmet dinner of instant noodles and tinned tuna. I then turned in for a night of secret gin sculling my sleeping bag. I had the last laugh however when my trusty plastic sheet ensured that I emerged unscathed from the night's shower whilst their fancy Eiger tents leaked like barges.

After another appetizing meal of chemical saturated noodles and chocolate, we broke camp and made for the summit of Gede. Eventually the forest opened out onto the 3000 plus metre peak of the volcano. After sloping off and discreetly parking my breakfast behind a tree (and wishing I'd bought more fresh underwear with me) I joined the others on the summit in brilliant sunshine and stared down a sheer cliff face into the spectacular smoking crater.



Several hundred photos later we descended the few hundred metres to our second campsite. Now ascending and descending clearly exact different tolls on the human frame. Ascending will get you breathing heavily and sweating like a Bluebird driver with a broken AC of course. Descending has its own quite literal pitfalls however and the constant jarring on the old legs turns them to jelly in no time at all. It was only thanks to a couple more vitamin C and electrolyte filled lung rockets that I was able to make it down in one piece.

The second campsite was a wonderfully untouched and enormous grass meadow situated in the original larger crater of the volcano. The meadow was flanked on both sides by steep forest covered peaks. Alas, one of the porters, the rookie of the bunch, had failed to make it with one of the whitey's gear, proving that nurture rather than nature is the making of a sturdy sherpa. The sun set in a riot of red, plunging us into the sort of almost freezing temperatures that necessitate the building of a nice, big campfire. You can't beat a jolly good burn up and the kids, no doubt spurred on by that weird preadolescent desire to set fire to everything, were in their element.

Sunrise the following morning was magnificent. The sun burst over the peaks, half blinding us as its rays refracted off the dew soaked grass. This was the stuff of life. All of nature is surely unquestionably beautiful. Only man makes ugliness. I sat and watched feeling as close to spiritual as my grizzled old atheistic weltanschauung would permit and gave thanks that I hadn't decided to spend the weekend in a shopping mall. It felt good to be about as far away from modern life as I could get, unencumbered by the ideological rubble of the new century and freed from the blank, joyless positivity of the PR speak that now saturates our every waking moment and the crushingly depressing effect that it engenders in me.

Then came the payoff. After another stomach turning breakfast of instant noodles and tinned curried squid (I must have had some kind of blackout down at Hero) it was time for the 8 km extreme downhill trudge back to reality. Towards the end, the old legs were starting to pack in and almost gave way a couple of times. No man, or mountain, has put me down yet though and I managed to drag my wounded carcass across the finish line in time to see the still sprightly kids enjoying a game of Frisbee and asking where we had been all this time. It was only the special ire reserved for child killers in jail, plus my now near paraplegic condition, that restrained me at that point. Mind you, the whole trip had been a stroll in the park compared with the subsequent drive back to Jakarta through 37 km of gridlocked Puncak.

Java Lava? These people are evil destroyers of men, however if you are interested in joining one of the group’s many expeditions, then take a look at their website.

All of our operators are busy at the moment...

Been too busy climbing a mountain this weekend to post the usual bilge but I'll be back next week with an interesting post about...er...climbing a mountain. Here's a wee taster:

Jakarta Without Us

Browsing through the racks down at the charming Aksara bookshop recently I chanced upon a couple of interesting items. My first purchase was a handsome foldout Green Map of Jakarta which indicated some of the city's more supine places of interest and greenery. Places that take one away from the ceaseless roar of two-stroke engines and the unrelenting din of commerce. Alas, the only sizeable green areas on the map are Ragunan's large but otherwise rather drab and dilapidated zoo and the pubic topiary that surrounds Sukarno's great erection (i.e. the Monas park).



Other listed areas of greenness are almost laughable in their diminutive footprints. Menteng's Taman Suropati, for example, is often promoted as a city park whilst it in fact more closely resembles a traffic island in size. In fact let's be honest, it is a traffic island. The woeful lack of green spaces in Jakarta has been well documented of course and is brought into even sharper relief when one contrasts our megalopolitan warren of concrete rat runs with the stunning rural beauty to be found elsewhere in the Archipelago.

My second bookshop purchase however afforded me the opportunity to drift off into a reverie of a rather greener Jakarta, albeit a Jakarta without any actual people in it. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is a bold thought experiment that looks scientifically at what would happen to the planet and its great cities and feats of human engineering if the entire population of the world was suddenly removed from the equation, never to return. Resembling a more analytical, non-fiction version of one of recently deceased prophet of the future JG Ballard's early disaster novels (such as The Drowned World), The World Without Us is food for thought indeed.

I thought that I'd draw on the book this week and try and paint a picture of what would happen to the Indonesian capital over the years and millennia if its 15 million residents were to be suddenly abducted by a presumably extremely large spaceship.

Firstly, Jakarta's houses and residencies would unravel themselves after just a few short years. Indonesian housing is often of a poor quality with many seemingly being built out of breakfast cereal instead of bricks, and this would hasten its ultimate doom in the absence of any human intervention. In Indonesia's humid climate, spores would quickly penetrate the city's houses, turning hardboard to paper, rotting studs and floor joists and generally munching them to bits. Ants, roaches and even small mammals such as Jakarta's huge army of rats would soon move in and complete the job.




Moisture and rainwater would enter roofing panels around the nails, loosening their grip. Eventually, gravity will do its work, joists will cave in to the pressure and the city's roofs will collapse. An Indonesian house would probably last 20 or 30 years tops with no people around to look after it. Only bathroom tiles, the chemical property of their fired ceramic not unlike those of fossils, would remain relatively unchanged.

Meanwhile, as buildings crash down, lime from crushed concrete will raise soil pH, inviting in trees and re-greening Jakarta in a way that will make it even Ragunan Zoo look like chicken feed. The city's open sewers would jam up with plastic and other human detritus (as they pretty much do anyway now I come to think of it). Jakarta's depleted groundwater will also rise again and thus soil will be sluiced away and roads will crater.

A global warming sea level rise of an inch per decade combined with the fact that Jakarta's marshy coast is sinking (the airport toll road has allegedly sunk by over 2 meters since 1980) will ensure that most of the north of the city ends up in a watery grave. In fact 20% of Indonesia's 17,000 odd islands are set to disappear by 2050. On the other hand, the city's denuded and decimated mangroves would reappear and re-green the new coastline, wherever it ends up being.

As for Jakarta's best known icon, the previously mentioned Monas, the destabilizing ground will see even this hubristic testament to one man's pride topple and its 35 kg of lustrous golden flame become cratered before eventually disappearing. In fact, fast forwarding tens of thousands of years after our imaginary spaceship incident, the only remaining testament left to the urban sprawl that was once Jakarta will probably be the man-made, and as yet un-biodegradable, complex polymer plastics that humanity has churned out around one billion tons of since World War II.

Maybe 100,000 years hence, microbes will have evolved the enzymes needed to break down our plastic gift to the planet but until then, those Blackberry casings, Hero shopping bags and even the pen that I'm now writing this with will be the longest surviving human artifacts and the only things that remain to indicate a human presence when all other vestiges of our lives in the Indonesian capital have long since been blown to the four winds.


In this apocalyptic context, the recent Situ Gintung dam burst disaster is a metaphorically perfect embodiment of our precarious position here on this swampy floodplain. Scary stuff I know but still, look on the bright side, at least will get to go on a spaceship.