Patriots
(and Scuds)

Emails

Journal entries

Bag the Exit
Journal entry, 2002

Furor in Canberra, Australia. Philip Nitschke just announced that his organisation (Exit) would launch the Exit Bags next month no matter what.

This pro-euthanasia club is the loudest in Southeast Asia, I guess - sometimes I think Nitschke is simply addicted to noise and too thrifty to pay for ads. This Exit Bag kit consists of one plastic bag (oh, I wouldn't guess!), specially designed to fit every sort of head including the German Neanderthalian, guaranteed to be wholly airtight. This you put on and close the edges around your neck, and from there bon voyage.

Doesn't sound like a good way to die, to me. Even though messier slitting wrists decidedly looks better. But according to Nitschke (yeah, this name reminds you of an insane 19th century German, alright) a lot of people love it.

What caught my ears was the reaction from the anti-euthanasian flock. The organisation calls itself the Right To Life.

Right. The right to life!

Its spokesperson said, "Australians have been under a lot of stress these past few years and many people have been desperate to end it by suicide. Imagine how many lives will be taken if this product is coming to the market! We must save these lives."

Saving lives, ma'am?

It is notorious, my aversion to things that are commonly using the word 'life' as a genre as if it is a profession or something. They are linguistically speaking utterly illogical.

The right to be alive? Alright, if you wants to. But it is clearly authoritarian to force people who don't want to live to live; and to call it salvation and protection of a right smacks of madness. They plan to deprive these suicidal people from their right to die if they wish so. That's a war against logic to me. Even if you keep things like a terminal case of cancer, AIDS, and such aside, still there is the right upon your own life. That is why I am against Naziism and the like - homicide is wrong because who are you to decide other people's exit?

But these other people themselves must have their right to make such a decision. To force them to live despite an all-cancerous existence, despite an incurable helplessness, and so forth, how can these be described as 'saving' people? That's inhumane. That's cruelty. That's barbary and oppressive.

But that's a personal opinion that I never advertise. Now Nitschke's campaign would never get to its aim because of the natural fright of death and the socially-inseminated belief that death is wrong (oh, yeah - not just how to, but itself). Religions have made it so.

And Nitschke himself is alive; that rather makes it a bad campaign from the start.

Demarcating Enviability

Journal entry, 2002

I was surprised that R called me this early morning; in my world it was even beyond a wake-up call, at five-fifteen when even roosters were not yet awaken; I have no idea what time it was in Lyon, and what the heck was she doing there in of all places France.

Then after she hung up an insomniac German rang; W couldn't sleep and always forgot that we are six or seven hours apart clockwise.

The two calls are not connected in any way except that both were of my number. R knew by name several people I know, but she doesn't know anybody that I only met two or one year ago; by then we have lost contact. W is among these latecomers in my life, and his wife is even newer in my address book - I talked to her for the first time in January this year. W himself wasn't there before 2001.

Yet in my mind, now at least, the two people are somewhat similar - R is a widow, happy with her freedom; W is married, happy to be so; but a strange discontentment is there in both cases, of what they cannot tell.

So hard to satisfy the human mammals, isn't it.

I had never pressed them for details so I that I could perhaps have drawn a conclusion of what gnawed at their sleepless souls at night. In R's case, I couldn't do that because we have known each other for a very long time (almost 10 years); in W's because we barely know each other at all. And lately I have lost appetite in other people's business. Frankly if someone is not content with his or her life, whatever the cause might be I don't want to know.

However, it is impossible not to infer anything. So my picture of R's problem has been, after she was by herself, of a sort of irritation that even though she can do whatever she wants and be wherever her mood tells her to be, the baggage from the previous marriage - kids - annoys her. And she couldn't send them to her ex because he has been dead, and she would have felt like a bad person if she sends them to her or his parents instead - the usual case of someone who knows what she wants and how to achieve it but getting roadblocks others put on her way, a social harness which she also believes as right to put there in the first place. The typical kind of dilemma.

W's case is probably of some lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. I can guess at one of the causes (his wife, whom he really loves, has been the laughing stock among his 'friends'; she suffers a rather enormous obesity and several acute diseases). He (they) rarely goes out especially to large gatherings that are related to the office where he gives his service. So far I can see nothing clear to nail down as other causes, because W is a skillful worker, in possession of a bright, systematic, scientific mind; I don't think there can be anyone who criticizes his work or how it is done. And he loves his job. R loves hers, too. W has no complaint about his way of life. R doesn't, either. Both persons think they are where they should be.

I think I like them because of that.

I mean, here are the people who, in themselves, have no lack - compared to others whose problems are within themselves, for instance the German F. Sure, R has her inner possible guilt, and W his low self-esteem, but those are forced on them by agents from outside the selves. If no one would accuse her of being the worst mother in the Australian history by leaving the kids to their grandparents, R would be more than 100% alright. If the mean and childish and sometimes satanic co-workers of his are nonexistant, W would have nothing to keep him awake at night. I'm almost certain of that.

But those are wishes and they still have to face what is real. Nonetheless, though social problems could push one to the edge, people like R and W have what it needs to get those solved, even if right now they don't recognise the fact yet.

In a sense, I find these two persons enviable. They have real problems requiring real solutions that can be worked out. I am a lesser kind of mammal. One or two problems that I have are things purely within my own mind. Computer game junkies would see what I mean; unreal and surreal enemies are harder to defeat, even if you cheat.

Patriots (and Scuds)

Email. Reply to Günther Dau, 2003

SEE ALSO: History of Indonesia

This Bush Junior war elicits a stench of unpleasant deja vu flavored with something I find hard to express -- but it might be enough if you can imagine how it is like to be your stomach after getting off a 20-hour flight right into a cruiser which is caught between the Baltic storm's teeth in the middle of a frosty winter night.

I never turn on the TV lately, never read the papers either, and never tap the news online; but there is a war getting on out there, no one could entirely miss things like this. Bodybags have started to pile up. Crackers have begun to whack the enemies' cyberlives. It might trigger the WW III for all my pessimism knows -- and the little boy Bush could, upon his second term, go on neglecting the American interior, cutting military taxes, and sniffing oil anywhere in the world, to make up for what he couldn't manage to sip back then in the dusty Texan years.

I really hate losers that somehow have happened to claw their way up to some thrones.

Anyway, you forgot that U.K. is there, too, under the frying Babylonian sun. You also forgot that Singapore was (or is -- I don't think anyone could wrestle off the past of being) within the British Commonwealth. And by nature Singaporeans seem to us here as have always been either too cautious or too cold or too scared; we of course never know which one is the case; but regardless of the answer I personally think they only exercise what is dictated by the thing we call commonsense.

And we, Indonesians, come to notice that 'common' is harder and harder to find these days, let alone 'sense'.

Officially, so I heard, the Republic of Indonesia or the bureaucracy that runs it condemned this Gulf War II. And the people -- well, you asked the wrong person when it comes to that. I know nothing of the people. You probably know more than I do. A few dozens of the 220 million of Indonesian citizens have surely been picketing the U.S. and U.K. embassies in Jakarta, without confirming this to any newsmongering agency you can be sure of it as factual. A few others might have done the same to the U.N. office. While the rest --

The rest of the 220 million would have been waiting for commuting buses, selling vegetables, mending interprovincial roads, planting rice -- the rest of the 220 million just live like they always do in any season.

Already a chopper was down yesterday, and without seeing real combat for long 4 U.S. soldiers and 8 U.K. troops were dead.

I remember how I felt when watching some self-mutilating blunder by the Americans in Afghanistan, a few nightmares before today; some had shot down their own comrades. Jesus, I thought -- they died just for that? It's like an own-goal in an already messy football match; unbearability comes so handy you no longer know how to react.

A friend told me about attempts to recruit (another deja vu, this) volunteers to plunge into the fire of Baghdad. He said the demagog of the enterprising organisation described the volunteers (so far reportedly consisted of himself, his youngest brother who didn't find a job in Jakarta, and his neighbor who owed him two hundred bucks) as 'patriots'.

He's not unique. A handful of such people are always scattered here and there. The rhetoric, too, is a worn-out garb corroded by age. I can't say you got to get concerned by this.

But not getting concerned by the war itself is inhuman, subhuman, superhuman -- pick any of these ranks. I only have a cliche on my tongue -- grief isn't dead in me for anybody's demise; I don't give a damn about what his passport says.

Patriots, the demagog said. Launching them to down the Scuds is the only thing they do out there in faraway Iraq.

Most Famous Unknown

Email. Reply to WS, 2003.

SEE ALSO: History of Indonesian Fine Arts - Indonesian Contemporary Artists, Galleries, Collectors & Curators - Real-life Curatorial System & Art Gallery Management in Indonesia

Simple and short, the advice you never want to hear: go home.

Snatch enough empty beer cans and flood the recycling industry with them and get a one-way third-class plane ticket and go back home.

Yup, now.

It doesn't take Freud to assess the condition you've been so long in -- you have never made Europe home, for whatever reason you've never got to admit.

Hence the feeling like what you always have upon waking up in the sunless morning, i.e. like a piece of ten days-old cabbage impassionately consumed by little green monsters from the inside while in the dumpster under the incessant torrent of tropical carbon emission all day and merciless dusty rain all night.

The number of Indonesian artists who have been flying abroad with the intention to commit some sort of emmigration threatens to get countless; the war of prices international aviation firms have made themselves busy with these days tends to swell it further up, regardless of the weather.

From the very beginning I have always had misgivings. I believed I already knew the taste of your today's coffee. But it never cracked a boa-constrictor's satiated smile on my face whenever I found myself being right about it all along.

Discounting things like religious miracles and ruling out the possibility that you'd get abducted by UFO's, I say you will almost never make it out there on any foreign soil. Hardly anyone we know will. With some achy breaky heart I have to deem this thing you crave next to impossible to accomplish.

European and American art spheres are centuries older than the rickety toddler we got here (paradox is our middle name, you see), their systems really work, and their infrastructures almost don't need mending even when El Nino is approaching; we can't live up to their standards of excellence -- and failure.

The only way to 'go international', the only channel possible, the only path that makes sense, is by staying here, making this pit your homebase, and spread your web out from here.

Everything is ghastly cheaper here, from lodging to meals to accolades -- and these are the things that anyhow have the capacity to boost you up. Can you afford what it needs to create large oil paintings on canvas in, say, New York? Can you hire artisans to build a non-crappy installation artwork in, for instance, Berlin? Can you get a free ride to somebody's house in the middle of the night to borrow a few bucks to buy some milk for your kid in, just an example, London?

X, living with his girlfriend's income in Germany, for five years now has been doing nothing but going to groceries for her and to the laundry and house-cleaning while she works. Y, betting on his girlfriend's salary as a lecturer, has been seeing nothing of Australian fine art for two years straight, being confined by household chores and babysitting activities in their one-room overheated apartment. Z, whose name looms bigger than other Indonesian artists abroad, never managed to exhibit in any respectable gallery or museum, let alone sell, his paintings in Amsterdam although he's been a citizen for 13 years -- he and his wife live by what he got from sale in Indonesia. The ridiculous process of re-importing artworks like this has been going on for so long and no one, I assure you, find it sane.

And others, many others, whose names I don't even know, are of the very same fate.

Don't cite Heri Dono to my face. You have no idea what you're talking about. Heri lives here. You almost can't catch him doing so, but the quickly-filled passports he's been having mean trips. Not emmigration. He's no expatriate in the sense you, if only you have a job now, would have been.

That is why he becomes so big. That is why he's probably the only Indonesian artist ever heard of in places like the USA after Affandi. That, to your grief, is why he is able to stack so much in the bank.

Do it Heri's way or just get back to your father's rice field and toil under the sun like God had intended Adam to do. He didn't suck Eve's salary and heaped up continuous complaints on her earwax. If you keep on reading Heri's career the way you today still do, you're entirely hopelessly the greatest artistic jerk I've known. That way you have wrecked the nerves of two women at once and at least three men -- your so-called friends who have spared no word to urge you to do exactly what I'm telling you to -- DB even offered everything he has at your disposal if only your misled head can be cured; he offered to house you and your kid and your girlfriend if you come back here a trio of cheese-smelling bums. You sin against him, against us, against yourself.

And to get back to Indonesia once every solar eclipse, to show off that you are no more 'one of us' ('one of them', I'm not an artist anyway), just because you have lived in Chicago since Newt Gingrich's heyday and have had one art exhibition at somebody's garage on the seventh street the night before it was demolished to build a condo -- this sort of sin might be the explanation why you are to share a room with Adolf Hitler in Afterlife.

You can't compete with the European domestic artists, and the way things are going on in here are so yawningly different from theirs. You can only stand on more or less equal footing with them if your works come there from here -- a joint international exhibition, for example, is always held, organised per country, and the country curator for Indonesia might pick you up among the available hordes of undernourished, overdosed, unkempt artistic aspirants. It is much saner to do your best in the country of your birth, and try to surpass yourself every time around that one day some chance to exhibit in Europe or the U.S. comes your way. It is Indonesian curators and art critics and galleries and foundations that could lift you up to the international realm. Digest this right. They are parts of the worldwide web of art people; through them you could get out -- to come back in when the episode is over, to create anew. This isn't only sensible but also the only way there is.

I have no idea how all this eluded almost every artist who flew out of Indonesia and replanted themselves at the mercy of some dubious natives.

It must have been the six millionth time or so, now, that I say a foreigner's name is not a visa. Yet, while I'm saying this, hundreds of local artists are chasing every available caucasian and Japanese tourist out there, in the ill-concealed wish to be brought with them back to whichever country they came from.

Shame is one of the few things I find most unendurable. I can't think of how I am not understood when I feel nothing of this but humiliation. Those freeloaders out there are our people.....

You said for the sixteenth time this week that your pride would rather get crushed to bits by the Red Army's tanks rather than boarding the cheapest airline and go back here utterly Euro-less and totally unknown by the art world you left behind.

Alright, let's talk self-centeredly. It hurts my pride to have you stay there in a perennial loitering business with nothing to create and nothing to show and none whatever to sell. You might be right in diagnosing me as having smitten by some 'manic nationalism' if this means I, Indonesian, to see you, Indonesian, live so indefinitely at the expense of a formerly carefree young European woman who is now just a faint shadow of an exhausted working-class member burdened by all your daily necessities and nightly agonies.

You've known me long enough to suspect that for that alone I can't promise not to cut your balls off. Where's the old-fashioned country boy in you now, who wailed of manly pride ages ago before all this? If you talk of shame, this should have been the very first entry you clicked.

It is ludicrous, the sort of shame you and others of similar inclination out there, have been transmitting; "I'll never go home until I have made it here" -- my, have the 32 years of your life deserted you? The shame should have been about staying there in the foreign land that doesn't really do anything for you, for whose benefit you also never came close to contribute, immersing in hazy self-pity, being a woman's purse's epiphyte, drowning in artistic impotence since all projects you ever have in mind is destined to stay there unrealized for sheer financial reasons.

You've been straying too far even from yourself.

Go home.

Dead (or) End

Email. Reply to Marco Ambrosini, 2003

When you reach a dead-end, what would you do?

I guess you could drill through the wall or something. Go around it. Over it. Dig a tunnel beneath it. Get a cab. Rent a chopper. Hire construction workers.

I couldn't explain to either Mr. G or his wife how it is for an ancient Javanese to react upon such a thing. They don't even know there is such a word as 'fatalism'. 'Determinist' is taken to mean company managers.

But an all-out defeat, an utter devastation, a time when one loses everything and when 'being pushed back to point zero' is no exaggeration, is commonsensically speaking too big to handle. So what is one to do? The getting-stunned part is over, what would you do?

We initially discussed F, who is now in dense therapies, and from the case the talk came to some wider arena of human vaccination against insanity. Then of what cultural backgrounds have to do with it.

This is rather straying to the wrong direction, since F didn't go insane because of losing his family, but he lost them because he was a lunatic.

Mrs. X said that her very distant relative "is half Sumateranese, so when he snapped he got easily angered and violent" - that happened when the man lost everything to a debt-collector, and he was sent to the house of the mentally deranged. Is still there now since 2000. I don't agree with the putting of the blame on the Sumateranese half, but still we talked about races and ethnicities.

My view of lunacy (as is of many things, especially criminal tendencies) tends to go to the direction of "he was born that way" - archaic, so Medieval, deliberately inconsiderate, politically incorrect, but if I am honest that's my real thought about it. I've seen too many lunatics. Really. All are incurable. Most don't need triggers and repeat the thing that took them to shrinks over and over immediately after released as sane. ST, HP, JK, are evidence to sustain the Dark Ages theory of lunacy.

Mr. X firmly believes that daily problems unsolved in time are seeds for this, and that's another common and old opinion. He also said that a dead-end "surely could turn you or me crazy".

But ancient Javanese, those whom all others call too lazy to do anything, got to a dead-end and tried to make a home there or a home out of it. This is the eldest sort of response to the situation of hopelessness.

But while they laid down there to spend the next many years to shake not fatalism but their heads, actually a hope was still kept deep inside - they're just squatters, no permanent residents, perhaps one day Destiny would kick them out of there.

I guess I couldn't explain it because I'm inclined to do just that.

While I am really repulsed by such an inaction of others.

For instance, I think all evil spirits in me got an uprising when, after telling all his problems to me, that bloke F didn't confront his wife or meet his kid or call his lawyer or hire a hitman but instead locked himself up in a dark room for two days straight. That saved electricity, but how disgusting for an onlooker - let alone for his family there under the same roof. And he only got out of there for food - without even getting some ideas to run for President or rob a bank or obtaining lottery numbers - like people who stay alone in the dark for that long usually have done.

So I don't condone this sort of behavior.

But as long as you don't drag anybody else into it (F did; his wife, when she got sick of how he behaved and was publicly ashamed of being related to him, tried to kill herself), I don't find any reason to positively say making a home in the dead-end is wrong. You might get some rest there at least; you might regain some strength to demolish the wall and make your way through.

This depends entirely on your kind of personality, but I think just an average sort of Homo sapien's intelligence and an ordinary state of sanity are enough to enable you to do it if you are willing to try.

You know what differs you from the lunatics? You get up again from the knockout fall. They don't.

You need some time to rest, you need some time to re-think things over, you need some time alone and you need some encouragement/companion/love or whatever you might call such a power from the outside - while social calamities sink the born lunatics deeper everyday. Self-pity is normal and even healthy in the first stage of confinement, but the lunatics are stuck there and go no further.

Personally I think as long as you are not F everything you do or do not do is right. Because anything he does is wrong.

Men like F, even if they are dead, won't let the people they leave to have the end of the problem in sight.

Indonesia Onlinehold

Email. Reply to Dwayne Hoffman, 2003

If only you knew how heroic it has been to actually set a homepage up and keep faithfully updating it from time to time, when you are in Indonesia. It involves lots of guts and loads of trix and oceans of patience and frequent cold water-splashing on your head; I believe one can make it a lawful occupation that can't be taxed, and if here is a spot where saints are made then the few million of online Indonesians would all go to heaven.

For most of my life [click here for Indonesian history -- it'd be helpful if you glance at it to ZIP the otherwise too long explanatory part], the Indonesian telecommunication biz had been strictly monopolized by the state via one of its squadron of flighty tentacles. This one and only company in charge with the building, maintaining and giving service of telecommunications -- from satellites for TV's to public phone booths, as a matter of course, did not do what it did not have to do -- for instance, running some customer service. That was sensible of it. It shows how deep they understood the human nature. Why run if you can walk, and why walk if you can sit? So, that was the way things went here until the last several blinks of the 20th century.

People waited for one generation to get a phone installed in their houses -- the company thoughtfully constructed a perfect surprise for all the aspirants to become its clients; they, too, waited until the applicant has completely forgotten about it, has moved to another town, or has been deceased for 3 years, before they made the preparation to install a phone there.

Public phone booths in all sort of eyesoring designs were built here and there all across the country when the New Order regime was still at the height of its power [see History of Indonesia again]; such a technological marvel, really; a strayed tourist that initially asked an airport personnel when was the flight to Bangkok [Thailand] to be, but somehow ended up getting transported further inland without leaving the country, could have been delighted to spot a phone booth in the middle of nowhere in particular, in a place pestered by golden rice fields and swampy waterways, and he thought to himself now he could at least dial his mom in Nebraska, the National Security Council, or 911, in that order; but lo and behold -- the booth was unmistakably there, however not the phone.

Exotic vandalism like maiming phone booths and taking the phones and cords home (or wherever, those are not salable anyway) is an everlasting headache to not just tourists but also the singleminded, singlehanded phone company, because it kept claiming to have been at the brink of bankruptcy no matter what, so understandably it was grieving when a few cents were lost via the hands that rocked the phone booths.

But the tourist was not getting robbed of the chance to connect to his own world, mind you; the considerate phone company only provided public phone booths for local calls -- not even interlocal, see; no long distance whatsoever. And until today there is no way you can use coins to dial any number but your neighbor next door, and why would you want to call him, for God's sake? Yet the thoughtful phone company thought of everything for you, so just in case you actually want to call the neighbor next door, there's the coin-phone you can use anytime. It would be very convenient for both of you. He would never hear the phone rings because of the loud alternative rock he always pretends to listen to.

Then the dawn of 'globalization' came in the 1990's, and being kicked into it by various creditors from outer space (of this), the phone company cracked its door open a little bit, and told everyone that it thereby catered to the need of the non-needy to make overseas calls in some substantial rate. Monopoly gained it lots of cash, but this was always dismissed as unreasonable doubt that only anchored in ignorant citizens' heads, because the truth was the company claimed another bankrupt year.

Next came a nationwidely-broadcast statement that from then on the telecommunication in Indonesia would be open for competition according to the law of the recent capitalism; it meant there came one competitor for the previously monopolizing company to deal with; whose share was owned by the state, too. Privately owned phone booths started to boom in almost a literal sense; everybody procured a license to open at least one-phone moneymaking establishment in his own garage that partly was used as a laundry; the thing was officially called 'telecommunication deli' and it stayed on until the 21st century, providing for the populace whose phone -- ordered in their grandpa's days -- was still uninstalled and who needed to call or fax some people outside their own houses.

Mobile phones in locusts-like mode came later, and the business was further divided to admit more players, so by the first year of 21st century there are approximately five or six major cellphone-line providing companies in Indonesia, offering five or six different ways of telling customers "The number you call does not exist", "Message not sent", "Message delivery failed", and "Unable to locate server".

Internet cafes started to show their noses up in 1990's. I started to use the internet in 1994, on public computers in their custody. Internet connexion by cellphone only came to existence in 2002 in tiny little hesitating steps, and this very day is still undecided whether to stay a toddler forever or to actually learn to walk towards maturity. Meanwhile the much cheaper phone connexion via cyberspace is still partly monopolized, another reasonable rule made by the venerable ex-monopolizing phone company; because it would kill the entire business of writing long substantial bills to charge those who frequently call overseas with, and of course we wouldn't want that to happen to the historic company we have been growing up with. To this day voice over the internet protocol is blocked away from the national air.

Amidst the salty breeze and backwatery superstitions of the town of Kiel, Germany, and among the barricading hills of the rain-drenched little spot of Largs, Scotland [click here for both], you can, no matter how lousily, get online in a way that somewhat resembles getting online in New York City. But with such a rich and long ancient history, Indonesia is of course telecommunicatingly unique.

That means you often need ten whole minutes just to get a page open. Hours to download one single song of 1 MB+. Countless 'HTTP Error' messages. Loads of "GPRS connection failed" flashes. And no ordinary Math is sufficient to add all the number of times up of disconnection in the middle of whatever you were doing, by the dial-up network and the service provider, whichever was it that you used.

Public libraries have, for the past 33 years of my life (which is 33 years in all) been silence materialized; only the initiated handful of the very same people go there -- to read newspapers, since they have already known all the books there, including the latest addition to the libraries' collections, which arrived fresh from the binder in 1975 or so. It is advanced libraries already if there a thing named computer is sighted anywhere within, even if it operates on some pre-Y2K programs that require banging on the CPU every five minutes. So we don't go to public libraries to get online. We go there when compelled by the campus' bureucracies to obtain some papers saying we are not kleptomaniax, or when the phone company made us brokenhearted so severely that we wouldn't even notice where we be.

Cybercafes to this very day charge around 25 or 30 cents (US$) per hour, a yippee price, say you; but the one and only phone line in the cybercafe you go to is sliced into 10, 15, or 25 sublines attached to 10, 15, or 25 computers, among which are the cybercafes' attendants' PC's which are continuously on and in use, by which they download dirty pix to chain-mail to their colleagues in every other cybercafe whose mode of operation is exactly like this one.

So now you know why they charge 25 cents. After one hour you still couldn't open that Yahoo! Mail page. At the end of the second hour you almost succeeded in submitting your password. Then you got to spend another hour to try to persuade Yahoo! you are really you, a fact it didn't readily accept after you got disconnected by the cybercafe's attendants because you slowed their download-rate down by using the computer to access any page at all online.

Finally you came to terms with Yahoo!, and the cybercafe attendants have decided to give themselves a coffee break, so your online life started to buzz, you thought. At approximately that moment, the electricity died.

Power supply, even in the mainland, Java, is always nightmarish; all of a sudden and for no calculable length of time electricity would just die. Particularly in the worst, darkest, wettest and windiest monsoon nights. You can imagine what it's like in other islands unblessed-with Java's privileges such as hosting the President and Cabinet and Parliament and HQ of the national power company.

For probably those and estimately twelve other reasons, Indonesians have not really been online. A glance at directories and portals must have already given you the sketch of that; only after the year 2000 a few service providers began to look like living. A small number of companies, galleries, and nondescript commercial enterprises got homepages. Personal web sites started to adorn teenagers' and college students' calling cards. In 2002 sidewalkers already knew the word (untranslatable into our language, so adopted literally in exactly this tense) 'chatting', although most of them had no idea what it means and where from. In 2003 a handful of governmental agencies spent taxpayers' money on webmasters that yielded some sort of not just wholesomely uninteractive but also often colossally unattractive pages. Internet this year has contributed some fresh cons, too -- the Indonesian cops have begun to dispatch cyberpatrols for real life retribution.

But Indonesia is largely still on hold. All of the problems I have mentioned here have still been at large. E-commerce stays a myth. Getting online is still not a need. The vast majority out there still have no idea what the internet is all about. A PC set, around US$ 1,300 these days, is still an unthinkable luxury to most. Even on pirated programs it still costs 3-6 months of salary; most cyberentities only get online at work, using office computers. The greater part of bureaucracy is done manually. Even several banks still use tellers' handwriting. Service providers, portals, companies and so forth died very soon after launching. The supposedly commercial web sites have never got updated at all. Personal sites have been abandoned by the fashion victims after the dawn of cellphone-related trends. 'Chatting' is still the main feature accessed most often, but the profit for phone companies are from SMS -- as usual, an actually utilitarian service becomes a fad. And the internet is, to these people, outdated mode of connexion after the arrival of polyphonic ringtoned cellphones, cheap SIM card (as low as around 6 US dollars), lowest-priced 'black market' phones (an actual term used by cellphone traders to refer to the 'branded but not genuine' hardware they sell -- for instance, a new US$ 300 cellphone could be gotten at US$ 90), and increasingly growing sort of services offered.

As usual with us, whilst we haven't done yet with AMPS we grabbed the GSM, as nothing worked the way they should have we took up CDMA. All the latest on Planet Tech is assumed at once when even the primitive prototype isn't yet mastered, let alone got over with. Plus none of any degree of sophistication refrains from taking days off during every national holiday. All phone companies, under whichever regime, seem to make it a point of duty to assume that when they don't need a phone (or internet) then nobody does, either. You can imagine how it is as those are the people who are only available at the end of the phone line during working days and business hours, for one of Indonesian officegoers' article of faith is that the state or the company or the people or your grandmother (as long as not theirs) were created by God to pay for their personal stuff as long as the stuff is done or gotten at the office. So, from Friday morning to Sunday evening nothing works, especially the SMS, MMS, and GPRS. Because from Friday morning to Sunday evening those phonepersons don't use the phone, being not at the office.

If you ask me, this will go on until deep into this century.