The Soul of Jakarta

In a previous entry to this blog I have written about some of the positive things about Jakarta that are often overlooked by the casual visitor. I have been visiting Jakarta since 1996 and have tried hard to understand what it is about this city that attracts me so much.

I often tell people that it is the culture and the history of Jakarta that I find endlessly fascinating. And these aspects of Jakarta will definitely be the subject of many of my blog entries to come. But that is not all. There is something else about the city: It has a soul.

With 10 to 12 million people crammed into this metropolis, human contact is inevitable and privacy is minimal. One can scarcely find a corner of the city that is free from the signature of human presence or activity. Singapore lacks space too but people there still have the relative isolation of individual HDB apartments with HDB estates properly interspersed with lovely green parks. The average Malaysian middleclass live in fenced-up terrace houses in relatively well-planned tamans . The middleclasses with their HDBs and terrace houses define the surban landscape in Singapore and Malaysia. They commute to work daily using MRTs or Protons. The cities belong to them.

In Jakarta, the middle and upper classes also live a life as luxurious, if not more, than the people in their neighbouring countries. Their mansions are opulent and they have a retinue of maids and servants to tend to their everyday needs. But they live in a super-terrestrial world that is removed from the real Jakarta. The city belongs to the labouring masses - the people who throng the streets peddling aqua (mineral water) at traffic junctions, salesgirls selling the latest ponsel (handphones) in crowded malls, hawkers frying gorengan below the flyover, tukang pijat (masseurs) in international five star hotels, teenage hookers in Chinatown diskoteks, menial clerks in small trading companies and vagrants who nongkrong(loiter) by the sidewalks: They define the city.

Here working class families pack into shanty dwellings that sprout between skyscrapers owned by the super-rich Indonesian Chinese conglomerates. They work, eat, fornicate, sleep and breed in this nether-world beneath the rich. Students and young workers would live in kos-kosan (boarding houses) or rumah kontrakan (rented houses) and take the rickety buses, ojeks, bajajs or mikrolets to work. Every now and then, truckloads of hired placard-shoving, slogan-chanting demonstrators of some insignificant political party would spill out into the streets to protest against yet another corruption scandal or demand for the umpteen time, the resignation of their government leaders causing macet (jams) in the city center.

Jakarta is one big chaos. But somehow by some miracle everyone seems to have a purpose, everything seems to fall into place and the city functions as one. The faceless masses give the city a certain colour and personality. Their ceaseless, uncomplaining struggle to eke out a living in whatever way they know defines the indomitable spirit of the Betawi people. And the city, like one gigantic organism, breathes and heaves to the rhythm of their activities. This is the soul of Jakarta.