Zen and the Art of Driving in Jakarta

I am lucky that my office is only a ten-minute taxi ride from where I'm staying. I also consider myself fortunate that I do not need to drive here in Jakarta -- I rely a hundred percent on the taxi service, which is cheap and efficient, and many times better than what we have in KL.

Typical of the Third World, the roads here are one big chaos of cars, taxis, motorcycles, bajajs, food pedlars, pedestrians and smoke-belching buses, all jostling and intermingling in a free-for-all, exacerbated further by a total disregard for traffic rules among its users.

Those of us who learned to drive the "proper way" often steer as if our cars are discrete components on a production line: You maintain a safe distance from the car in front of you and you move mechanically along your lane, conveyor-belt fashion, starting and stopping obediently at the dictates of the traffic lights, as if remotely controlled.

Driving this way is admirable and should earn you a license without having to resort to kopi-O money, but it will be the source of endless frustrations if actually practised on the gridlocked roads of Jakarta -- or KL for that matter. The trick to driving in Third World countries is to ignore lanes and just "go with the flow".

One needs to adopt a bit of De Bono's Water Logic to drive successfully here. The key is to keep a fluid style where one flows around obstacles, always exploring and squeezing into every possible crevice and opening, all the while maintaining a flexible and nimble attitude, adjusting, accomodating and letting the traffic find its own level.

The traffic is to be viewed as an organic continuum, oozing it ways through toll expressways, asphalt roads and gravel paths, ocassionally even flooding its banks, spilling onto pavements and grass embankments if necessary.

It is interesting to note that the Dutch first built a series of canals in Jakarta (then Batavia) as the main channel for transporting people and goods. The canals today have degenerated into smelly monsoon drains, but I suspect, the old aquatic habits of drifting and dribbling have persisted and have simply been transposed onto the modern eight-lane highways of Jalan Sudirman.

Unlike their Malaysian counterparts, drivers in Jakarta maintain a Zen-like state of calmness in the face of this daily traffic madness: It is probably a combination of the Javanese virtues of patience and courtesy and a general nonchalant attitude towards traffic violation. One rarely encounters despicably self-righteous drivers who would latch on to every tiny transgression that you make and chastise you with mighty blares of the horn.

The old Javanese adage, alon-alon asal kelakon, loosely translated as "slowly, as long as one gets results", is the underlying motto here. And everyday,on the fume-choked roads of Jakarta, I see the exquisite Javanese mind at work, and I tell myself how glad I am that I am not in KL.