Of Indomie Breakfast and Naked Apes

I ocassionally have Indomie with my colleagues at Watie's canteen, located at the basement of our office building. You can get a nice steaming bowl of instant Indomie noodles for breakfast for around 3,500 rupiahs, topped with an egg. This is one of the delights of living in Indonesia - that slow cup of kopi tubruk and Indomie with friends at local warung during breakfast or coffee break.

It is similar to the teh-tarik-and-nasi-lemak routine I used to have at the mamak stall outside the office in Malaysia. These are moments to look forward to in our daily office lives; a brief respite from the day's work, a time to catch up on the latest gossips and an opportunity to build camaraderie with office-mates.

Male smokers usually would have their usual bonding session at the emergency stairway. They will form an exclusive clique, shrouding themselves under a thick cover of cigarette smoke to exchange notes on the latest massage parlours in town in conspiratorial tones.

There is also another clique - usually formed by the female clerical staff - who will normally congregate together for lunch in one of the empty meeting rooms or cubicles. If during lunchtime, you smell wafts of mouth-watering nasi padang pervading the office air, you can be quite sure that it is coming from this group.

The techies in the office - the engineers - would also form their own lunch group. Their lunch excursions are normally executed with ruthless efficiency: They would go out at 11.30am (to avoid the lunchtime office crowd) and make a beeline to the cheapest foodcourt in the vicinity (where they can find what they call home-cooked food) and be done by 12 o'clock (so that they can surf the Net) when the rest of the people are just mulling over where to go for lunch.

There's another group who will always want to drive out for lunch. This is the group who can never decide where to eat. Sometimes the whole group would agree to set out to eat at Pluit and half-way they will change their minds and decide to eat at Mangga Besar instead. These are normally food snobs - always with a ready opinion on where you could find the best food.

Getting together for a smoke or a meal is are avenues for social bonding. Our bonding behaviour has deep evolutionary roots and our social instincts are still not very much different from those of the apes - as famed zoologist Desmond Morris would readily point out to you. His first book, The Naked Ape created quite a stir when it was published in the 60s because in the book he made objective but humorous observations about the human animal, pointing out how many of our so-called "human" behaviours are not very different from those found in our animal counterparts. His famous first lines from the book sum up his view:

There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens.

Apes bond through grooming (picking out lice from each other's body) and through the sharing of food. Bonding creates mutual-cooperation that enhances the group's overall survival. So much of our office politics and politics in general are just subtle reenactions of hierarchical instincts that are clearly observable in ape communities. Whenever I see cliques forming in the office or people jostling for position and power, I try to imagine ourselves as apes. It helps to put things into perspective.