Last Tango, in Jakarta

It was Norman Mailer's book, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing that got me interested in watching Last Tango in Paris. And yesterday during lunchtime with my colleagues at Ratu Plaza, I happened to come across its DVD which I promptly purchased together with a couple of other titles (The Animatrix, Salvador and Memento). Armed with this delicious selection, I decided to avoid my clubbing friends that evening and have mini film-festival in my hotel room instead.

Norman Mailer devoted almost an entire chapter in the The Spooky Art to analyze Last Tango in Paris. After watching it last night, I know why he was obssessed with it: The screenplay could have been written by Mailer himself - vulgar, sexual, brutal and shocking even to the not-so-prudish among us.

Not that the movie contains excessive nudity or sex but its unabashedly sexual premise, content and dialogue test the boundary of what we would consider decent for a mainstream film, even by our present-day standards. One must remember this was a movie made in 1972 - more than thirty years ago; imagine the kind of reaction it would have brought to the audience then.

And even more shocking is the fact that the movie stars one of the biggest all-time Hollywood actors, the God among actors themselves: Marlon Brandon. And back in 1972 the aging Brando was already showing signs of that ballooning belly that would become his trademark in later years.

With Brando as a middle-aged American expatriate in Paris and a young 20-year old Maria Schneider as his sexual interest, director Bernardo Bertolucci cooked up a concoction that induces intestinal discomforts to those who are used to seeing Brando in "nobler" roles in films such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now or even A Streetcar Named Desire.

Imagine him, in his usual mumbling style, spewing lines like: "Your happiness is my ha-penis". And that is only one of his more "poetic" utterances in the movie - many of these lines are actually improvised by Brando himself. The effect is as much shock as it would be to an UMNO politician discovering that God also mencarut.

A plot about a man (Brando) and a young woman (Schneider) - both not knowing each other's name or background - meeting daily in a bare Parisian apartment to have sex provides the framework for director Bernardo Bertolucci to dwell on his exploration of grief and the sexual enigma of man-woman relationship. Maria Schneider plays the role of an almost cerubic-looking young woman who is repulsed yet attracted to a sexually sadistic Brando who himself is haunted by the suicide of his wife and seemed not interested to pursue a relationship beyond a sexual one.

Those who have seen 9½ Weeks starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke would immediately recognize echoes of Last Tango in it. Though not as visually erotic or sleek as its successor, Last Tango in Paris has less pretensions and has a rawer edge to it. Critics in 1972 hailed it as a work of art and a pivotal event in cinema history. Both Brando and Bertolucci were nonimated for Oscars for their works in this movie.

I wouldn't go as far as claiming that this movie is a work of art, nor would I dismiss it as smut passing off as art; but I still found it engaging and Brando's characterisation of a tired sadomasochist, honest and believeable. Like street graffitis, simple naked honesty often borders on vulgarity. And vulgarity, stripped of all pretensions, sometimes works better than any other artistic device.

Last night safe in my hotel room, surrounded everywhere by the vulgarity that characterizes so much of Jakarta nightlife, I found Last Tango in Paris rather congenial entertainment, for a quiet Friday evening.

The Immensity of Space & Time

As a form form 5 schoolboy in Malaysia, I was enthralled by astronomer Carl Sagan's documentary miniseries on science called Cosmos shown weekly on RTM at that time. I subsequently devoured all his books, which besides the best-selling book adaptation of the series, includes Broca's Brain and the Pullitzer Prize winner, The Dragons of Eden. What sticks in my mind still after all these years is a small and beautiful dedication Carl Sagan wrote on the first page of Cosmos to his wife:

"In the immensity of space and time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Ann Druyan....."

Or words to that effect, I cant' be precise as I am quoting from my rather unreliable memory.

Even though I live in Jakarta, I do not feel I am that far apart from my friends in Malaysia and other countries whom I communicate with frequently through SMS and e-mail. We, the Net generation are used to instantaneous communication - SMS, e-mail and online chat make us feel as if physical distances are of no bearing.

But we forget that we are able to communicate (two-way, that is) with each other because we share a common moment in time - we live in the same epoch. We are not able to SMS to someone in the Victorian era or chat with our descendants from the 22nd century. The separation of space has been conquered but the separation of time has so far been insurmountable.

Carl Sagan passed away in 1996. He even wrote a fiction: Contact, which became a bestseller and was made into a reasonably good movie directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey as a very unlikely priest. But I am digressing.

Time travel and all its resulting paradoxes is a hackneyed sci-fi theme. But in mathematical physics, time is not treated very differently from space. Einstein has shown us that space and time are intricately linked and that the phenomenon of gravity is nothing but a geometrical property of the space-time continuum. Even eminent scientist like Martin Rees in a recent interview with the BBC, does not dismiss that time-travel is a theoretical possibility.

We all know the pangs of being separated from our loved ones whenever we are away from home for long periods. Imagine the pain of separation by time - it is unbreacheable: That is the premise of the love story Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour which I happen to be able to catch again on HBO recently. It is not a movie that I would put on my top 10 list but the soundtrack by John Barry is unforgettable. There is also a recent Korean movie about a pair of lovers who communicate through mail across time but again I'm digressing.

We could remain stationary in space (or at least from our point of view, as the Earth, Solar System and the Milky Way galaxy are all moving) but we are constantly moving in time. In a previous blog entry, I discussed how each of us could perceive time differently. Blogging is an act of attaching thoughts to cyberspace, marked by time.

Let us marvel at the fact that, you and I now are sharing the same point in cyberspace and that our brief lifetimes happen to overlap within the vastness that is Time.

Wasted Bandwidth

The mind has a lot of unused bandwidth. If I remember correctly, it was Bill Gates who made that comment. Everyday as we go about our daily lives, we inadvertently allow plenty of blank spaces to pass through our field of vision - unadorned walls, blandly carpeted walkways, white ceilings - in between focussing our attention on things that we are really interested in. These are unused bandwidth. Wasted information real-estate.

Imagine if you have a KL map on the wall in front of your desk. As you go about doing your everyday tasks, inevitably your eyes would have scanned the information on the map into your brains hundreds or thousands of times. And subconsciously, they do register. Who knows, the next time you get stuck in a traffic jam in the city, your brain might suddenly come up with an alternate route unknown to you before.

We also absorb information that we do not even consciously see or hear. The advertising people are experts on this so-called subliminal messaging. In a movie theatre, one out of the 24 frames projected on the screen per second could contain advertisements or other types of messages and we would never even know it. Some religious groups also claim that certain rock bands inject subliminal Satanic worship messages backmasked into their songs. Samples of this are abound on the Internet.

On the more positive side, there's a whole industry of self-improvement products based on subliminal messaging. These range from simple relaxation tapes with gamelan music mixed with humpback whale songs, to nature sounds filled with the humming of tropical insects and the pelting of raindrops to synthesized music that is supposed to stimulate your chakras to French language lessons for sleep-learning.

I have a fondness for maps and I enjoy looking at them. When I was living and working in Singapore I used to have a large map of Jakarta city pasted on the wall of my bedroom. I ended up living in Jakarta.

Thinking back, had I known it would work so well I would have put up a poster of Sophia Latjuba instead.

The Quintessential Rebel

The other day, I was watching news about a pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong on the BBC. One of the demonstrators who was ranting and raving through a megaphone caught my eye - not because he had something interesting to say, but because he was wearing a T-shirt with a giant image of Che Guevara.

I'm not sure if the particular demonstrator was fighting for the same ideals that Cuban rebel Che Guevara was. But that black-and-white image of an unshaven youth with wind-swept hair, searching eyes and tilted beret has become a symbol of rebellion and revolution since the sixties. I remember a couple of years back, the photographer who took that picture of Che Guevara finally managed to win back copyright protection of the image which had over the years been considered public domain, and had even been used in a Smirnoff vodka advertisement.

Ernesto Guevara, known affectionately as "Che", was an Argentine doctor who joined Fidel Castro in the overthrow of the American-backed dictator General Batista in Cuba. The movie Havana directed by Sidney Pollack, starring Robert Redford and Lena Olin is set against the backdrop of this revolution. Though universally panned by the critics as a poor immitation of Casablanca, it is one of my favourite movies mainly because it has a good soundtrack and also because - OK I admit - I am a hopeless romantic. There is a scene in the movie where Lena Olin and Robert Redford were confronted by a group of guerilla rebels - not sure if it was intended: one of the rebels was made up to look unmistakably like Che Guevara. Or perhaps it's just that Che's image of a rebel has completely coloured our perception of what a rebel should be like.

Che Guevara became part of Fidel Castro's communist regime and was called by Time Magazine as "Castro's Brain". He was later to help guerilla fighters in other parts of Latin American and even Africa. And like all romantic rebels, he died young at the age of 39 while fighting with the guerillas in Bolivia in the sixties.

Thus his image still lives with us today, together with James Dean and Lord Byron as symbols of youthful idealism and rebellion. That iconic black-and-white image was my only "knowledge" of Che Guevara until I stumbled upon his book, The Motorcycle Diaries a few years back in Singapore. And surprise - it wasn't about politics or revolution but about travelling on a motorcycle, riding up the South American continent for 7 months after his graduation from the university. What a delightful read it was: one is able to share the experiences of a young Che Guevara, bumming around the different countries of South America like a Latin Jack Kerouac.

Never mind that Che was a communist; as the HK demonstrator showed, it is the spirit of rebellion that matters, even if you are demonstrating against Communist China. In his book The Rebel: An Essay of Man in Revolt, the French existentialist writer Albert Camus proclaimed:" I rebel, therefore I am". And no one personifies the spirit more than Che Guevara, the quintessential rebel.

Preaching Java to the Javanese

Having lived in Jakarta for one-and-a-half years I've come to appreciate the ethnic and cultural diversity that's present in Indonesia. When I first started travelling here during the mid-nineties I, and probably like many other Malaysians assumed that Indonesians are one homogeneous lot and not very different from the Malays in Malaysia.

That was during the start of the Internet boom and being employed by the company that invented the Java programming language, I used to do a lot of presentations and demos here in Jakarta evangelizing its many virtues.

Chatting with my customers during one of those coffee-break sessions, I was perplexed when one of them told me that she was planning to go home to Java during the weekends. Isn't Jakarta located on the island of Java? Aren't all Indonesians living on the island of Java, Javanese?

I was soon to realise being knowledgeable about the Java programming language doesn't automatically make me an expert on the Javanese.

To Indonesians, Javanese refers specifically to people from Central and East Java, excluding Jakarta. People born and bred in the Jakarta area are called Betawi. Jakarta is not Java. Even the people from West Java, though technically Javanese, makes a distinction of themselves from the Javanese of Central and East Java, preferring to call themselves Sundanese. And mind you, these are not merely geographical distinctions, these different groups actually have their own unique languages and cultures.

Malaysians who know Melayu might be able to understand a bit of the Bahasa Indonesia spoken by the majority of the people here. In Jakarta, the language spoken by the local Betawi people can be loosely considered to be representative of Bahasa Indonesia, even though the Betawi dialect itself contains many Chinese (especially Hokkien), Portuguese and Dutch influences. Malaysians will be surprised that certain words which we normally consider bahasa pasar like the Hokkien gue and lu, are widely used here and even considered hip - quite like the use of I and you instead of saya and awak by the younger generation of Malay people in Malaysia.

The Sundanese people have their own distinct language, and one can find it being spoken quite widely in places like Bandung, the center of Sundanese culture. Malaysians might be able understand 70 percent the Betawi dialect if it is spoken slowly, but don't even bother to try with the Sundanese language. Or Javanese for that matter.

The Javanese language is the most intricate of all. They even have their own writing script - which looks rather similar to Sanskrit. The language is subtle, aristocratic and full of nuances. The Javanese are considered the most cultured of the ethic groups in Indonesia. Though most Javanese are Muslims, theirs is a culture steeped in mysticism with heavy Hindu influences.

I have not even mentioned yet the subtle distinctions between Javanese from Central Java (based mostly in Jogjakarta and Solo) and East Java (based in Surabaya). Nor have I even started talking about ethnic groups from the other islands like the Bataks, Minangkabaus, Acehnese (Sumatra); Bugis and Torajans (Sulawesi); Balinese (Bali) and Ambonese (Ambon).

The book, A Fragile Nation - Indonesia in Crisis written by Lee Khoon Choy, the former Singaporean ambasssador to Indonesia during Lee Kuan Yew's era, helped me a lot in understanding the diversity of culture in Indonesia.

Nowadays I could sometimes be able to tell apart a Javanese from a Sundanese when most Malaysians would not even be able to distinguish the Indonesian Chinese from the native Indonesians. I still have a lot to learn, but I guess I have come a long way since those days of mine preaching the Java programming language to the Javanese.

Mindful on a Monday

I make it a point every Sunday night to have a moment of solitude back in my hotel room. It is an opportunity to reflect back on events of the past week before starting another. I realise how important it is to quiet the mind even for 10 minutes - it allows the mind to reset itself, to find its balance again and to allow residual thoughts to subside.

During his lifetime, Mahatma Gandhi had a practice of designating one day of the week as a day of silence where he would completely abstain from speaking and would only communicate through handwritten notes. His autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth is especially revealing about his many dietary practices and the austere discipline that he imposed on himself. For example, he would only eat vegetarian food that does not require any cooking such as nuts and salads, and he would limit his personal possessions to only five items whenever he is travelling. I read a greater part of that book early last year while I was staying at the Aston serviced apartments in Jakarta, lazing and sunning myself beside the swimming pool. It made me feel a little bit bad about my own bourgeois lifestyle then.

One of my favourite Indian gurus, Swami Vivekananda likened the mind to a lake and thoughts to ripples on its surface. When the mind is at peace, the ripples dissipate and one can see right through to its bottom. Imagine one's soul like a shining jewel at the bottom of the lake. With a mind calmed, we allow the true essence of our soul to shine forth by quelling and preventing the ripples of thoughts that obscure this inner light.

We may think that we have peace of mind when we are resting at home, watching TV, or sleeping. These activities perhaps would take our mind away from more stressful things but they do not necessarily make the mind ripple-free. At home, we are constantly engaged in conversations which brings out a whole gamut of emotional responses in our heads. Watching TV is mostly a form of escapism where we choose to react to stimulus from another world instead. Though we might claim that we are getting entertained or informed, our minds are constantly reacting and responding emotionally to the random chatter from the idiot box. Even during sleep, the mind is full of activity, as I've mentioned in an earlier blog entry on REM sleep.

How then can the mind achieve total and complete silence? Only through meditation and prayer. Hindus, Yogis, Buddhists, Sufis and Christian mystics all meditate because it is the key to spiritual realization. The Godhead resides deep in our souls, ready to blossom like a lotus, if only we could quell the waves and storms that rage through our mundane minds.

In meditation, the mind grasps a singular thought or object of contemplation and eliminates all extraneous thoughts, allowing the mind to be focussed like a laser beam to penetrate the inner layers of the soul. Prayer in contrast is an inside-out means of achieving spiritual peace. Instead of using our minds, we tune our hearts towards God and allow our complete being to be spiritually aligned; eliminating all discordant thoughts through the sheer power of our inner conviction. We pray with our hearts and meditate with our minds. Both are paths to spiritual enlightenment.

Monday is here and the madness of the week has begun. The waves are starting to build up and if we do not know how to control them, we might end up being trapped in the middle of a raging storm. We need to know how to manage our thoughts and our minds. We need to be mindful before our minds get really full.

Going to work in Tears

It is strange but pleasant to wake up early on Sunday - even earlier than what I normally do on a weekday. The sweepers are still out there cleaning the mess from Saturday night and I could see the mother bathing her child in the streets. I am lucky that I live in Jakarta center unlike many of my colleagues who have to spend more than an hour on the road everyday driving to work. My taxi trip to the office only takes 5 to 10 minutes.

I remember when I was working for a multinational in Kuala Lumpur way back in 1995, I used to have to wake up early at 6.00 am in the morning so that I could drive from my home in Subang Jaya to the city center, avoiding the traffic jam. I would reach KL at around 7.00 am - two hours before office starts. With so much time to kill, I would indulge myself in a lengthy breakfast at a Chinese coffee shop behind Jalan Raja Chulan.

It was strange driving to work so early: the sun would not be out yet, and you had to switch on your headlights. At that time I had already caught the audiobook bug; usually I would entertain myself to an audiobook like what I did in my later years commuting by bus daily in Singapore.

Though my audiobook taste veers towards the classics and non-fiction, at times I would also indulge myself in a contemporary bestseller. I remember once, listening to Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County, driving to and back from work. The book was later made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep, directed by Eastwood himself.

For a whole week listening to the book, I lived with the characters and was totally absorbed in the touching love story of Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson. On the day when I was driving to work listening to the concluding chapter, I had tears streaming down my cheek. Luckily I was spared the embarassment of having anyone see me in that state because it was still quite dark.

Nowadays in Jakarta I do not get to listen to many audiobooks anymore as I hardly need to spend any time commuting. But I remember fondly those early mornings of mine driving to work in KL, misty-eyed with my mind completely lost in Madison County.

footnote:
I only found out the other day while perusing at the QB World bookstore that there's actually an epilogue to The Bridges of Madison County, published only last year. It is entitled A Thousand Country Roads. Maybe I'll catch the audiobook again.

Dreaming and Waking

I didn't sleep too well last night: I had accidentally fell asleep early - at 9 pm - after having a dinner of Chinese food with red wine with my colleagues at Jalan Batu Ceper; and then I woke up at 2.00 am in the morning. I could not sleep again after that. I had dreamt of meeting old friends and interesting strangers. My memory of it is vague but the overall feeling was pleasant.

We normally dream every night but forget about them when we wake up. Some people keep a dream diary, recording their dreams immediately upon waking. It is an interesting practice but I myself do not keep a "dreamblog" as such. There is a phase in our sleep called REM or Rapid Eye Movement when dreaming occurs. During this stage in our sleep, our eyelids remain shut but our eyeballs are somehow active and moving, as if we are seeing, responding and reacting in a waking state. If we are awakened during REM sleep, we would be able to recall our dreams quite well.

I have been reading a book by Steven Strogatz called Sync. In a chapter on our daily sleep cycle, he likened the REM dream state to a car parked in a garage, with the gears put to neutral and the accelerator pedal down. Our minds are actually at a very active state during REM sleep even though we do not twitch a single muscle during the entire sequence. Dreams have always been seen as windows into our subconscious. Sigmund Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams is considered a classic of psychology.

While I was lying restlessly awake in bed early this morning, I surfed the channels on my TV and immediately caught Jennifer Lopez's The Cell on HBO. I had seen this visually arresting movie when I was in Singapore maybe two years ago. The Cell is the first full feature work of video director Tarsem Singh who directed music videos for the the pop group R.E.M. before (Coincidence?). The movie is about plugging into the mind of a serial killer who is already in comatose to find out the whereabouts of one of his victims who is about to die. Jennifer Lopez plays a researcher who uses high-tech technology that allows someone to enter into the subconscious mind of another.

The Cell shows the subconscious as something out of Salvador Dali's paintings. We see luscious Jennifer Lopez, clad in dazzling opera-like costumes being propelled into the surrealistic settings of the killer's mind. Watching the movie on TV made me feel dreamy again. And as the hours progressed I was lost in the nether-land between dreaming and waking.

I woke up not feeling very well rested. Perhaps I'll catch a wink or two later. But I need to finish off some work today - I need to be fresh and alert. Dreams are achieved through hardwork......

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.

Bernard Kok dances the Mambo

I have not seen my friend Bernard Kok for many years. We used to be colleagues while I was working as a rookie systems engineer in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. I remember him as a very good IT salesman: he had good people skills and he was always willing to go the extra mile to keep his customers happy.

He told me once that he simply loved dancing. With his old-fashioned plastic-rimmed spectacles and his skinny frame and flaying arms, I'd always thought that he looked rather comical on the dance-floor. We used to go out drinking and partying a lot. And whenever he was drunk, he became the life of the party, strutting around the dance-floor, showing-off his moves in front of the ladies. We appropriately nicknamed him Bernard the Cock.

Our drinking sessions used to be heavy: We would order tequilla pops by the dozen and forced it down on everyone. We also used to order Guinness stout by the pitcher. I remember when Bernard decided to leave the company, we gave him a massive farewell party at the old Betelnut pub in Jalan Pinang. He got so drunk that night until he vomitted right into a half-full pitcher of stout. He was completely gone after that. We simply left him sleeping in the car and continued partying.

I also remember Bernard because he still owes me a book that he borrowed from me back in 1992: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - that emotionally evocative Pullitzer Prize-winning book by Oscar Hijuelos. The book was made into a rather entertaining movie starring Antonio Banderas and Armand Assante. The soundtrack of the movie was especially good, featuring Mambo legends like Tito Puente. It also made a hit out of the song Beautiful Maria of My Soul; the Spanish version was sung surprisingly well by Antonio Banderas himself.

Now everytime I hear that song, I remember the book and I remember Bernard Kok and I remember that pitcher filled with puke. I have never seen Bernard dance the Mambo. Perhaps one of these days when we do get to meet again, we'll ask him to demonstrate some of his moves. And just in case, we'll have an empty pitcher ready.

Paradise is filled with Books

Yesterday evening I stepped into QB World at Jalan Sunda and came out with three books. The only way I can prevent myself from buying more books is to refrain from stepping into a bookstore at all. I am such a hopeless bibliophile that I'd buy books just for the sake of keeping them, even books that I know I'll never read - not in the foreseable future anyway - but are good acquisitions for my library. Some women can't stop buying shoes, I can't stop buying books.

These days I'd rather call myself a book collector rather than a reader because the rate of my reading cannot catch up with the rate at which my library is growing. Just here in my hotel room, at last count, there are about 47 books stacked on my desk: They range from Modern Sundanese Poetry to The Guru Guide to the Knowledge Economy by Joseph and Jimmie Boyet.

Some people treat books as disposables - worthless after you have read them. Good books - and that covers a major portion of the books that I own - are not merely a medium for the conveyance of information like newspapers, but are capsules of experience. I've never believed in renting or borrowing books from the library. Books that I have read, I must own. They become a part of my life - my extended memory.

I take comfort in the fact that at least I'm not as crazy a bibliophile as people who collect first editions, book jackets or annotated copies by the authors themselves. A Pound of Paper by John Baxter which I've read earlier this year, gives an interesting glimpse into the crazy world of real bibliophiles.

In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, monks in a Benedictine monastery were willing to kill because of a book. In the movie adaptation of the book by director Jean-Jacques Annaud, the medieval monk-detective, Brother William, played by Sean Connery was portrayed to be a lover of books. In the climatic scene when the monastery is burning, he emerges from the fire clutching, not his fellow monks but books he had managed to save from the monastery's secret library. In another movie, The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski, which was also based on a book The Club Domas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, John Depp plays an unscrupulous book detective, hired by book collectors to trace rare and priceless books. Nothing beats a movie based on a book, about books.

There is also a scene at the end of of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report which lingers in my mind. The three clairvoyant characters, called Pre-Cogs, who in the movie are used like laboratory rats by a futuristic society to predict crimes before they happen, were in the end freed to lead a normal life. They were shown living in a country house, filled with books, happily spending the rest of their lives reading. That scene to me, is how I would imagine paradise to be like.

The Deadliest Sin

Eating is many people's favourite pastime. One hour before lunchtime approaches, the girls in my office would already be mulling over where they should be having their afternoon meal. Let's go for Tim Sum today. Another would interject: No! let's go for Manado food. A third one would say: But we haven't gone to the Batak restaurant for a long time! ....No, I have a better suggestion, let's go for noodles, at Bakmi GM...... The debate continues until 20 minutes before twelve when everyone starts rushing for the door like a pack of hungry wolves. The scene repeats itself everyday.

I believe many people are mildly acquainted with the so-called Seven Deadly Sins defined by the early Church, thanks to the hit thriller Se7en, directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt. Of the seven sins, to me the deadliest of them is Gluttony. Why? Because it is often brushed aside as being rather harmless.

Let's face it: we, the fortunate modern middleclass folks eat a lot more than we should. Probably the root cause of many of our sicknesses are due to overeating and over-indulgence in tasty but unhealthy food. Our eating habits border on gluttony itself. And yet we treat eating so casually, and consider every opportunity or excuse to eat as something to cheer for. It's so-and-so's birthday and he's buying us lunch! And off we go stuffing ourselves silly with greasy dim sum. This casual acceptance of an unfettered appetite for food spells enormous danger for us. Chiefly because we don't see it as danger. Clinically, compulsive overeating is recognized as a serious medical disorder.

I have nothing against the enjoyment of good food. I myself fall victim to cravings for certain types of delicacies at times. But this habit of being overtly obsessed with food and eating plainly for the sake of eating is one that I think is accepted with impunity. We rightly condemn people who drink or smoke. But what about overeating - eating way beyond our daily energy requirements? Why shouldn't there be an abhorrence for unnecessary eating just like how we abhor smokers and drinkers?

Over-indulgence in any of our human desires or impulses becomes a sin. Lust, greed and anger are all sins of extremes. In controllable doses, they are considered healthy, and even necessary. But why are we letting our basic need for food set loose like a lion in the fields? There is a reason why Dante placed Gluttony on the second lowest level in Hell next to Lust in his Purgatory. Gluttony is as primal a sin as lust. Better watch your eating habits: it could be the Devil's backdoor to the corruption of your soul.

By the way, where are we going for lunch?

Watching Citizen Kane

The QB World bookstore screens art-house movies every weekend at their Pondok Indah and Kemang stores. And yesterday I saw the promotional poster at their Jalan Sunda branch announcing that Citizen Kane would be the selection for Sunday night. Not wanting to miss this rare opportunity, I decided to drop by in Kemang for the screening.

Citizen Kane, directed and acted by Orson Welles and released in 1941, is considered one of the greatest movies ever made. It is also perhaps one of the most analyzed film in cinema history. What are the reasons for its greatness? As a movie, it can be viewed from two aspects: one as a technically innovative film that breaks new grounds in cinematography, editing and directing; the other as a very engrossing human story about the rise and fall of a charismatic man named Charles Foster Kane, told in a masterful manner using all the film-making techniques at the disposal of director Orson Welles.

One might think that to the average modern audience, a black-and-white movie like Citizen Kane will be quite difficult to sit through. Having so many accolades already heaped upon it, the audience could also be led to believe that this is one of those ponderous art-house films made to show off the director's technical mastery of the medium, only suitable as a laboratory specimen to be dissected by film students.

But once the movie began, I was completely drawn into its story. At its core, the movie is a mystery story about the last word uttered by the fictitious media baron on his deathbed: Rosebud. Who or what is Rosebud? As his life is slowly revealed through mock newsreels, flashbacks and newspaper headlines, we are drawn into the mystery and enigma of this multidimensional character called Kane who chose to take over a crumbling newspaper and vowed to transform it into an honest, fearless and unbiased press, albeit one defined in his own terms. With the mystery of Rosebud as the propelling force, we are led on a journey of the man's life; through his successes and failures in friendship, business, politics and love.

The use of deep-focus, the innovative camera angles and the effective use of flashbacks all contributed to a movie that does not have a single dull moment. Using a vast array of cinematic story-telling devices, Welles provided the audience with revealing glimpses of the personality and character of this man Kane; every sequence, every shot and every introduction of character building up to the drama of his inevitably lonely death - which we were shown at the very beginning of the film. And then only in the final lingering scene, the answer to the mystery of his last word is revealed to the audience.

I left QB World with a very satisfied feeling. I have always wanted to watch Citizen Kane after reading so much about it during my teenage years as an avid film buff. As I rode a cab home to the hotel, I smiled at the thought of how I finally managed to catch Citizen Kane after a wait of almost two decades, and in the most pleasantly unexpected places: at the cafe of QB World in Kemang, Jakarta, while eating spaghetti with Bintang beer on a quiet Sunday night.

Normal Nomads

Normal Nomads

Today as I was dressing up in the morning, I realised how bare and limited my wardrobe is. It has been so because I have always made a conscious effort not to acquire and accumulate too many things; it makes packing and moving difficult. It is a habit I've acquired in these past 7 years of constant travelling, leading almost a "nomadic" lifestyle.

Nowadays the word "nomadic" has become a geek term. Google the word "nomad", you'll end up with links to the latest MP3 player from Creative Technologies. Being nomadic to IT-savvy people conjures images of someone with a laptop, connecting to the Net from a wireless hotspot or dialing up from a hotel room. We have forgotten the real meaning of being nomadic.

Since the beginning of history, human beings have been living a nomadic way of life. It is initially driven by seasonal survival needs; tribes have to move from place to place in search of food, water and trading opportunities. The livelihood of people are tied to the land; and landscapes change with the seasons. Animals migrate in search of grazing pastures and water. Man and Nature are bound by an interlocked cycle of mutual embrace. As the earth revolves round the Sun, the seasons come and go, drought, floods and other cosmic calamities shape the distribution and destinies of all living creatures. We move in Space based on the dictates of Time. The nomadic way of life is in essence a normal and natural one. We move because Earth is itself a nomad in space.

The gypsies, the Bedouins and tribes and the Penans in Sarawak are still leading a nomadic life even until today. Eric Hansen's book Stranger in the Forest, which describes his years of living and hiking with the Penans in the jungles of Borneo is a highly recommended read. In some countries, the right to live the nomadic life is protected by the law, even in an urban environment. Safe camping grounds are provided for modern day gypsies and other travellers and is considered part of good urban planning.

Being nomadic drives us to be constantly on the alert for new opportunities and experiences. Every new place, like the start of a new day, is a new beginning. We are constantly refreshed by new people and places that we encounter. Like it or not, we are all travellers of Time. The minutes and the hours drive us on inevitably to our old age and death. Nothing in Nature remains static. The question we should ask ourselves is: Why shouldn't we be constant travellers of Space too - like the nomads?

An Optimistic Day

Came out this morning from the hotel to see something I've not seen in Jakarta for some time: blue skies. The sun was warm and caressing, making me feel enormously happy and bouyant. As I walked past the Spanish Embassy towards Sarinah, I almost stepped on a teenage boy who was sleeping on the streets, blissful and oblivious to the passers-by.

I'm looking forward to a fruitful and productive day. I have some presentation slides to build and lots of reading to do. Haven't watched a movie since The Matrix Reloaded but I'm not sure if I'll have the time to catch one this weekend. I also have some unwatched VCDs back in my hotel room. I'm never short of things to do on a weekend.

I was watching Talk Show on BBC last night. Sir Martin Rees, a cosmologist was interviewed on his book Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival. I haven't read the book before but it is interesting to find out that an eminent scientist has a rather pessimistic view about the future of science and its impact on human society. According to him, the advance of science has created unprecendented risks for the human species with the possibility of small errors leading to global catastrophes. He's not just referring to the nuclear terror but things like biotechnology and nanotechnology. He is even putting a 1.000 dollar wager that there will be a major setback to human civilisation, with massive loss of life, by 2020.

That was food for thought for a Friday night. Maybe the human race will not survive this century, but I woke up today feeling very optimistic. Well, even the sky in Jakarta is blue.

Fridays are full of Possibilities

Traffic on a Friday in Jakarta is very unpredictable. Taxis are difficult to get in the evenings. Maybe I'll unwind with a slow beer at the Matabar opposite the office first. The bartenders there always tell me that the place is filled with ABGs ( acronym for Anak Baru Gede, pronounced "Ah-Bay-Gay" - teenaged or under-aged girls) late at night. Their promotional e-mail today screams: "Tequila Madness". "Ladies' Night". It's a pity that I've never been interested to stay later than 9 pm.

The single girls in the office would normally like to go out too. But I am in no mood to spend the evening listening to their office gossips. I have a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon waiting for me back in my hotel room; and Kafka's Letters to Felice sounds like more interesting company for a Friday night......

Bathing by the Molenvliet

Today we took one hour to drive to Mangga Besar for lunch. This area in Chinatown or Kota, popular for its nightlife, is also where you could find some of the best Chinese food in Jakarta. The traffic was so bad along the way that I started studying the huge dirty drain between Jalan Gajah Mada and Jalan Hayam Wuruk closely. One could see lots of disgusting garbage floating in the dark-coloured slime that slowly oozes its way northwards towards the sea.

I shudder to think that this "drain", was once one of the key canals in Jakarta which stretches from Kali Besar near the port of Sunda Kelapa north of Jakarta to Harmonie. Bordered by present-day Jalan Gajah Mada on the west and Hayam Wuruk on the east, the entire stretch then was an upmarket Dutch residential area known as Molenvliet. The canal which diverts a portion of the Ciliwung river from its main course to the sea was initially built by the Chinese in Batavia for flood control and transportation purposes. This was during the days when Batavia was a bustling port and was known as the "Queen of the East".

Mention Molenvliet to any Jarkatan, you'll draw a blank look. But anyone would know Jalan Gajah Mada and Jalan Hayum Wuruk and they would vaguely refer to the "drain" there as the "Ciliwung river". It may sound unbelievable but this mucky canal was also one of the major public bathing places in Jakarta. Even up until the sixties, one can still find scantily-clad women in sarongs, cleaning and washing by the Molenvliet.

The "bathing beauties" are no more in sight along the Molenvliet. But late at night along Jalan Hayam Wuruk, one can see many "street beauties", bathed in neon-lights, soliciting for customers from passing cars. And the canal with its ooze and slime dribbles slowly to the sea, oblivious to its surroundings.

K.uote:

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Every night I cut out my heart......but in the morning it was full again.

- Count Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient.

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Remembering Rubber

Rubber used to be the main export of Malaysia. But nowadays, rubber plantations are becoming quite a rare sight in Malaysia, replaced by up-market residential housing projects and six-lane highways. A generation ago, life in Malaysia or then Malaya revolved around rubber. My hometown in the Malaysian state of Pahang was essentially a settlement of rubber tappers.

I grew up in a middleclass residential suburb - perhaps the first of such in the town, which itself was a sleepy hollow nestled away in the hills forty miles away from Kuala Lumpur. Even though my house was a relatively modern type of Malaysian "terrace house", it was located on the edge of the residential area, next to a large rubber estate plantation.

As a child growing up in the area, the rubber estate was my playground. I remember those rubber trees with dark green leaves and scarred trunks - tattooed by the tapper's knife, rising in formation like an arboreal army from a Tolkien fantasy. They looked oppressive and mysterious at night - hiding within its dark bosom a cacophony of insects and other strange nocturnal creatures. My hometown was also considered a "Black Area" - an Emergency era label for areas with active communist insurgencies. In some of the more remote rubber estates one could hear then the distant crackle of the occasional gunfire.

In the morning, the rubber estate in front of my house would burst to life with activities. The trees, gay and resplendent under the morning sunlight, brimmed with bustling birds. Squirrels danced from branch to branch. One could see distant specks of figures in white - the rubber tappers - collecting the day's yield of milk-white latex from cups dangling from the tree trunks. In the rising heat, rubber seeds would burst out from their pods, falling like hailstones on the roof and road, with a sound like the popping of champagne in a pastoral feast. The rubber seeds have a hard outer shell, speckled-brown in colour. As children we collected these seeds and invented games with them.

Beneath the canopy of leaves, among the sentinel-like tree trunks, we played hide-and-seek. The floor was a carpet of rotting leaves, which when stirred, unleashed swarms of fiery mosquitoes. One could easily get oneself lost deep in a rubber estate; you only see the monotony of identical trees in every direction and the sunlight is shielded away by thick leaves leaving you feeling disoriented and lost like in some tropical twilight limbo.

It is an era already gone: the romance of colonial planters, estate bungalows and club houses - those characters and scenes that populate many of Somerset Maugham's tales from the Far East. What's left today are merely nostalgic references on bar menus like Planter's Punch and books like Out in the Midday Sun by Margaret Shennan, that recalls life in the colonial era fondly.

Now living in the middle of a concrete jungle here in this Third World squalor that is Jakarta, I remember those rubber trees next to my house in Pahang: they emerge like a dream in my mind, of a lost magical forest filled with the laughter and games of carefree children.

The Four Layer Stack

With the Matrix Reloaded doing successfully at the box-office, I guess the world has come to accept IT geekspeak as part of our everyday lives. The next time someone mentions about vampires or ghosts, we can assume that they are talking about particular types of rogue "programs" that have outlived their usefulness. We could also ponder whether a particularly charismatic religious leader is actually an "anomaly" of the system.

I am going to add to this pseudo-religious geek view of the universe by proposing that a human being is a "Four-Layer Stack". IT geeks are familiar with the term "stack" as used to refer to the TCPIP protocol stack or the seven-layer OSI stack. It is normally used to describe the architecture of a system in terms of vertical layers where each layer is an independent sub-system with well-defined interfaces between the layers above and below it.

The physical body of a human being is like the physical layer of the TCPIP stack or the hardware layer of a computer system. It is the lowest layer. It is something we can touch, feel and see. Our physical bodies define the first and lowest layer of the Four-Layer Stack.

What differentiates human beings from lower life forms is our ability to feel, think and aspire for greater things. We are more than molecular automatons whose only purpose in life is to hunt for food and to procreate. We are also emotional. Music moves us. We seek emotional contact with other people. We cry, laugh, love and hate. Emotions is something that sits on top of the physical dimension of our existence. It is the second layer of our Stack.

But is that all that is to being human? No. We are creatures of the intellect too. We are eternally curious about our environment and strives to learn new things. We read and write books. We analyze facts and figures and invent new products. We want intellectual conversations with someone of our equal. We want to be "stimulated" intellectually. Intelligence is something "higher" than emotions. Someone who thinks rationally and not react emotionally is looked upon highly. Hence it is no surprise that intelligence is the third layer on top of emotions in my Four-Layer Stack model of a human being.

What is the fourth layer then? It is something that is not so obvious: well-developed in certain individuals but vaguely defined in others. It is the Spiritual Layer. The most intelligent man in the universe will still find certain questions that perturbs him: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? What is the purpose of life? True, philosophy seeks to answer some of these questions but these are but intellectual attempts to answer questions that belong to the spiritual realm. If the mind is the home of intelligence, then the soul is the seat of spirituality. Of course, the soul is not something physical that can be pinpointed in space and time; It is something of the spiritual dimension. Even the best scientists in the world are driven by something more than intellectual curiosity. They long to comprehend the universe and seek to fathom God's mind. There is a spiritual dimension to all our human endeavours: peace, self-sacrifice and compassion are but glimpses of that yearning. The human species strives for something higher beyond our scientific, economic and social accomplishments. The highest layer of human existence is the spiritual one. And there are many ways for human beings to seek a connection with that layer. This is the domain of religion.

To bring things down-to-earth again, let's ask: Of what practical use is my Four-Layer Stack model? Well, for one you could use it to measure compatibility with your spouse or partner. Are you "connecting" on all four layers? Two computers communicate when all peer layers of a TCPIP protocol stack talk to one another. Is there physical attraction in first place? (Layer 1). Are there emotional feelings for each other? (Layer 2). Do you share certain intellectual pursuits together: Books? Movies? Hobbies? (Layer 3). And finally, do you share the same spiritual values: What is important in life? What makes life meaningful? (Layer 4). If you connect on all four layers, then the both of you are soulmates, destined to evolve together through space and time.

Some people connect well in certain layers but not others. Certain people are better developed in some layers and are completely clueless in the rest. A healthy human being is one who strives to develop in all layers. Do a complete stack-check of yourself. Don't blame me if one day your partner tells you that it is all over because you are "not connecting at all on layers 2 and above".

Of Corporate Cliches & Cubicle Creatures

Has your boss ever told you that you need to think out of the box? Or perhaps he mentioned casually in the team gathering that times are tough and non-performers will be managed? Or someone's success is due to teamwork?

For anyone who has worked in a corporate cubicle long enough, they will notice that all the expressions in italics are common corporate cliches which are trite soundbites used by corporate ladder-climbers to sound impressive during meetings or euphemisms to subtly remind subordinates who is actually in-charge.

We who have spent our lives working for big corporations could be forgiven for falsely believing that we are actually contributing something meaningful to the company and society at large. Didn't the company constantly remind us that people are our greatest assets? Imagine the employee's shock when bad times do come, these are the very assets that gets disposed of first.

No wonder Dilbert by Scott Adams is one of the most popular cartoon strips these days and has become the mascot for those who are victims of inconsiderate bosses, backstabbing colleagues, know-it-all consultants and endless corporate mission statement brainstorming sessions. The Dilbert Principle is the bible of the modern corporate cubicle creature who's sole purpose in life is to navigate safely from one payday to the next and avoid the next round of layoffs (the euphemism varies from voluntary severance scheme to reduction in workforce to plain simple cost-cutting).

We, modern men are deprived of the adrenalin rushes our hunter-gatherer fore-fathers experience as part of their daily lives. The fight for survival has been transferred from the savannah plains and medieval battlefields to the corporate boardrooms of multi-national corporations. Our violent instincts, ego, desire, lust and hunger are still as primitive as the ape-man; only our weapons and modus operandi have changed. How else could one explain why Sun Tzu's The Art of War is considered essential reading for every executive?

The Corporate Animal is appropriately called so because we are in essence still locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival; the size of our office cubicles is a reflection of our territoriality instincts. The Human Zoo by popular zoologist Desmond Morris is a humorous account of how similar the behaviours of modern urban people are to animals confined in a zoo.

We shouldn't be prisoners of the corporate cubicle. Life is elsewhere. We must unshackle ourselves from these false comforts and shallow pretensions. Only out there in the wild does an animal realises its true splendour.

Driving with a Dead Dog

Had the strangest of phone-calls from my colleague Edwin last night. Edwin is a flamboyant account manager who has a taste for the fancy and the luxurious. Usually busy with one of his many girlfriends on a Saturday night, I was surprised when he called me and told me that he is driving around the town with a dead dog in his car!

Apparent his pet dog has just died from sickness and he is looking for a place to dispose off its body. My sympathies, but why call me? He then told me that he was looking for the best river or canal in Jakarta to dump the body but couldn't find a suitable one as most of them were hardly flowing at all and were choked with garbage. He wanted to consult me be because he considers me an "expert" on the kali-kali (canals or rivers) of Jakarta!

Well, the reason why he considers me so is because I have often taken a keen interest in the history of old Jakarta - then known as Batavia. The Dutch had great plans for the city - they wanted to build an Amsterdam of the East with canals serving as transportation waterways into the heart of the city. It was a bad idea. In the tropics, the canals became open sewers and breeding ground for all sorts of diseases. But still in the old days one can find many boats and prahus transporting goods to and from the port of Sunda Kelapa north of Jakarta using these canals.

Today the canals serve the functions of monsoon drains and sewers. The many squatters that sprout up beside them contribute further to the ugliness and pollution of this drainage system. One can see many of these canals choked with black stinking sewage criss-crossing all over Jakarta city like festering wounds. I do admit that I am quite fascinated by them because to me, they define Jakarta: the dirty canals are symbollic of the poverty and filth that seem to ooze out from every pore of the city. Most locals do not bother to give them a second glance but I have spent weekends poring over maps and hiking across the city tracing their routes!

My friend Edwin, being an environmentally conscious fellow, did not want to dump his dead dog into a canal that does not flow. For an eerie moment I had the nagging suspicion that perhaps the dead body in the trunk of his car is not a dog but one of his jealous girlfriends. Shrugging the thought aside, I suggested a couple of options to him. Perhaps Kali Grogol which is wider than the others? Or the Ciliwung on its approach to Tanjung Priok? Maybe the one beside Shangrila Hotel, which supposedly was built to alleviate floods?

None of the options seemed to be appropriate for one reason or another. Like a couple of first-time murderers, desperation and panic began to creep in. Finally I jokingly suggested to him that perhaps he should sell the carcass to the Bataks. The Bataks are an ethic group originating from Sumatra, well-known for their fondness for dog meat. Edwin latched on the idea enthusiastically and told me that he is heading right away to the nearest Batak restaurant in Senayan!

Knowing what a good salesman he is, I won't be surprised if he tells me in the office tomorrow that he managed to clinch a good deal for his dead dog.

Reading Tea

I want to catch up on my reading this weekend. Been enjoying Smart Mobs by Horward Rheingold but I've been reading too slowly lately. I often use the bits and pieces of time - while waiting for my food to arrive and immediately after finishing eating - to do my reading. On weekends I'll park myself in a quiet cafe and spend one to two hours there engrossed in my book, while I sip a cup of tea.

I'm not particularly fond of American-styled coffee and hence I avoid places such as Starbucks or Coffee Bean. I prefer the old-fashioned kopi-tiam which serves good milk tea. This is rare in Jakarta. In fact people here normally drink local tea without sugar or milk. While "teh" would normally mean tea with condensed milk in Malaysia and Singapore, here one can hardly find a cafe that serves a smiliar cuppa - sometimes they don't even keep any milk! The kopitiam teh or the mamak teh tarik is what I miss most from home, since living here in Jakarta. But I have found at least one cafe opposite my hotel that serves Chinese-style tea with milk - the Arobusta cafe. It is one of my favourite haunts during the weekends. And I've spent many happy hours there reading and typing into my Jornada.

The worst places to drink tea are at Western cafes where they would just give you a cup of hot water with a Lipton teabag on the saucer - not even bothering to mix them together. But there are other delights in Jakarta - kopi tubruk (the local coffee with lots of sediments) and es jeruk (local orange juice). Or I can always go for a bottle of cheap Bintang beer.

A good cup of mlked tea with a good book. That'll make my weekend.

A Good Friday Evening

Everyone is happy and relaxed on Fridays. People go to the office in casuals; the Muslims go for their prayers during lunchtime; the non-Muslims, a long lunch break; everyone beams at the thought of a weekend ahead, with plans for clubbing, outings or simply catching up on lost sleep.

I'm not much of a clubber these days but occassionally I'd join my friends for a drink or two at the pub opposite the office called Matabar. It is quite a pleasant place if you go there early - before the singer starts crooning the latest MTV hits and ruin the relaxed ambience.

Once in a while, if there are visitors from Malaysia or Singapore, I'd take them to the nightspots in the Chinatown area, known locally as Kota. I am extremely aversed to noisy places, hence I avoid places with live bands. I cannot understand why people would want to have their eardrums abused by over-enthusiastic bands who mangle the latest hits and harass the poor audience to sing or clap along, adding to the already unbearable cacophony.

Gone are my days of clubbing at the Betelnut, DV8, Uno, Pyramid and Picadilly and other popular nightspots in KL and PJ. Except for DV8 (which surprising is still around), all these places are already gone. Even in Singapore, I do not patronise popular nightspots such as Zouk or Brix, preferring quieter places such as Harry's Bar at Boat Quay or hotel lounges. A relaxed glass of beer or wine with close friends is all I look forward to these days. Here in Jakarta, sometimes I'll go for a couple of Bintangs (the local beer) with my colleague at one of the cafes along Jalan Jaksa, the backpacker's alley.

Because I'm still single, people sometimes forget that I do not belong to their age group anymore. The twenty-somethings in the office are always trying to drag me to the latest hotspot in town: places such as Blowfish or Burgundy. These are the places to see and be seen. It seems rather pointless to me - I have already done enough clubbing for the past ten years. I'd rather go back early to my hotel room, have a warm shower, watch Crime Night on the Discovery Channel and slowly sip a glass of Merlot. That's a good Friday evening for me.

The Hotel: My Home, My Palace, My Monastery

One of the most common questions people ask me is: Why don't you get an apartment instead of staying in a hotel? People are often surprised that I've been calling a budget hotel my home in Jakarta for one-and-a-half years. Loneliness, claustrophobia, boredom and lack of privacy are some of the common fears for people not wanting to stay long term in a hotel. They cannot imagine how I could live, "holed up" in a small room.

I've often quipped that I consider the whole hotel my "house", and all the hotel employees, my friends and family members. And I have a retinue of servants to answer to my every whim and fancy. Living in such "opulence" and "luxury", why would anyone want to stay in a pretentious looking expatriate condominium 1 hour away from the city together with bules (Mat Sallehs) and their noisy kids who are forever splashing in the swimming pools?

I go back to my room everyday with my bed freshly made and my clean laundry hanging in my closet. I never need to lift a finger whenever I go out to catch a cab to work in the morning - the porter will rush down the streets to hail me one. And if I feel lonely, I can always chit-chat with Diki at the concierge, Marlyn at the reception or Wiwik from the sales department. Every morning I'm greeted cheerfully by the housekeeper Intan who keeps my room well-stocked with mineral water and coffee. And if I feel like it, I'll drop by at the restaurant downstairs for my complimentary buffet breakfast or hop into the gym for a workout and a relaxing session in the sauna.

Convenience aside, I have other personal reasons for staying in a hotel: it makes my life simpler. Everything I own can be packed into two or three suitcases. It helps me to maintain an austere discipline and forces myself not to accumulate unnecessary things and to keep them uncluttered. From previous experiences staying in an apartment or a house, packing up after a long stay can be quite a nightmare. The less space you have, the more orderly you become.

I like to think of myself as living the life of a Benedictine monk in a secluded monastery. The Seven Storey Mountain by the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton and The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris give good accounts of the monastic life. A quiet life of studies and contemplation is what I seek these days. My small hotel room serves that purpose very well. Every night I spend quiet moments in my "cell" writing, reading and typing into my Jornada PDA. Ocassionally I would stare out of my glass window into the night speckled with neon lights: deep in the bowels of the city, the night pulsates with sin and excitement - hawkers and hookers strolling the alleyways, junkies gyrating trance-like in smoky techno-clubs and ubiquitous taxi-drivers touting for customers outside every nightspot.

And I have my home sweet home right here in the middle of all this seediness - a sanctuary of peace in the Capital of Sin.

My CyberGuru

I'm not a Hindu but for many years I was a regular visitor to a Hindu cyber-monastery, reading and listening to sermons of the late Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami who passed away (attained Mahasamadhi) on November 2001. The site is updated daily by the monks in this Hindu monastery physically located on the beautiful island of Kauai in Hawaii. The late Satguru - affectionately known as "Gurudeva" - had been a leading figure in the Hindu world, responsible for raising the religion to greater heights, especially in the Western world.

What is surprising about Gurudeva is that he was an American, orphaned at a young age and started out as a classical and ballet dancer! Responding to his spiritual calling, he later went to India and Sri Lanka and tutored under the great Saivite Hindu guru Yogaswami. Gurudeva had since founded the Hinduism Today magazine and had written many books about the religion besides conducting his many retreats, speeches and sermons all over the world.

I first became acquainted with Gurudeva when I chanced upon his book, Merging with Siva at a new age bookstore in Mountain View, California in 1999. It was a thick book which I started reading then in the US, and continued doing so when I was back in Singapore for the duration of almost a year - slowly sipping and digesting the profound insights and wisdom embedded in this magnificent piece of work. The book changed my perception of life and deepened my understanding of religions. I have always been a student of yoga philosophy and eastern religions and read widely on all these subjects. Gurudeva's Merging with Siva expounds many religious concepts already known to me but it was done with such lucidity and beauty of expression, with an underlying voice that is wise, serene and compassionate that reading the book through those days and months in Mountain View and Singapore, I felt like I had gone through an intense spiritual transformation.

Merging with Siva is the book that I keep on my bedside, even here in Jakarta. I dip into it every now and then to gain fresh insights into Gurudeva's writings. Everytime I read his words, I understand something new. Like a scalpel of the psyche, Gurudeva's words help me to penetrate deeper and deeper into the inner layers of my mind and soul. I now view things and events with a keen intuitive perspective. It is a process of spiritual flowering. And my soul unfolds a little bit more everyday, watered by the transcendent genius of Gurudeva.

Dotcommed & Dazed

Last week when I was in KL drinking teh tarik with my friends, we bumped into one of the key figures of the dotcom phenomena in this region. This former owner of a high-flying dotcom company was treated like a celebrity at a time when the dotcoms could do no wrong. The whole industry then was caught up in a frenzy of public listings and stock options. He told us that he is now divorced and broke. A casualty of the dotcom crash.

The years between 1995 to 2000 were heady years of growth for the IT industry. It was a life of excitement and excess for all of us who were part of that boom. The corporate battle cries, the lavish stock options, the glitzy roadshows and the prospect of forging into brave new frontiers of cyberspace caught all of us up in a heady spin. No one wanted to be left behind: you are either a dotcom or you are part of the "old world". Everyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon. It did not matter how dotcoms were supposed to make money; hits and hypes were good enough indicators of future earnings. Paradigm change became the excuse for being unconventional. It was one long and wild party; one that finally ended with a thud and a lingering hangover.

We are still trying to recover from that hangover now. Many are still in a daze. And we are staring ahead not into brave new frontiers anymore but a wasteland of pessimism and cynicism. Like all battle-hardened warriors though, we would pick up the pieces and trudge on. Who knows, maybe further down the horizon there is another brave new world waiting for us?

The Buccaneer's Home

What a feeling to be back in Jakarta yesterday. After a week of relentless work, I have forgotten about the world I had left behind - the throng of people in malls, the smoky aroma of hawker stalls and the tumult of vehicles in the streets. Arriving back at the hotel was like homecoming with all the simple pleasures of familiar things.

I was tired but I still had some work left. I managed to dash off to Sarinah to shop for some fruits and juices and then hopped into Bakmi Toko Tiga for my favourite sapi cah kangkung with rice. A warm shower back in my room and I was back in front of my laptop, finishing my remaining work. The last files from KL was received only after 1.00am, and I spent another hour entering them into my spreadsheets. Only then did I collapse on my bed and slept like a baby.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever have the heart to leave Jakarta for good. But life is full of unexpected turns. I've lived in Penang, KL, Singapore and Jakarta. Who knows where I'll end up next?

Everytime I'm back in KL, I feel a bit like the buccaneer Simon Danz in Longfellow's poem A Dutch Picture, home from one of his many adventures in the seas . The poem begins:

Simon Danz has come home again,
From cruising about with his buccaneers;
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers.
..................

and ends with these lines:

..................
Restless at times with heavy strides
He paces his parlor to and fro;
He is like a ship that at anchor rides,
And swings with the rising and falling tides,
And tugs at her anchor-tow.

Voices mysterious far and near,
Sound of the wind and sound of the sea,
Are calling and whispering in his ear,
Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here?
Come forth and follow me!"

So he thinks he shall take to the sea again
For one more cruise with his buccaneers,
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers.

Thoughts Over Teh Tarik

I have been back in KL since Saturday night but have not had the opportunity to blog so far. The all-day, late night sessions since Sunday at the office preparing for a tender proposal have been sucking up all my time.

Today I managed to take a two hour break from this dreary proposal marathon. It was around 6pm and the city was winding down: people commuting home, executives making a bee-line to their favourite teh-tarik haunts and working girls window shopping at the malls.

It was interesting loitering around the KLCC area. I had a chance to observe my fellow Malaysians from a "fresh" perspective. Having been working and living overseas for more than five years, I feel a bit like an outsider everytime I come back to KL. I am constantly surprised at how multi-racial the Malaysian crowd is. And I cringe everytime I hear "Manglish" being spoken so blatantly. At the same time I am taken in by the prosperity of the population, the optimism of the people and the sheer diversity of talent that's present in the Malaysian society.

In Jakarta, I have been used to streets swarmed with the working class toiling day and night to make ends meet. Life is a constant struggle. Here in KL, life is more of keeping up with the Joneses (or the Wongs, Rashids or Ratnams). And the Petronas Twin Towers soar above the skyline like a symbolic portal to a brighter future.

And there at the new 24-hour Lotus restaurant (a gentrified mamak stall in essense), I observed the crowd of young executives attacking their roti canais and nasi lemak with gusto as I slowly nursed my favourite glass of teh tarik.

The Siti Sensation

Ask any Indonesian to name a Malaysian singer that they know, inevitably they will say Siti Nurhaliza. As I'm typing these lines at my favourite Internet cafe, strains of Siti's Cindai float through the air. I realised during my many years of coming to Jakarta that a good conversation starter is Siti Nurhaliza. Most admire her beauty and her voice. Her most popular songs here are Aku Cinta Pada Mu and Cindai. You can request for both of these songs in karaokes here but beware, they are notoriously difficult to sing.

I introduced one of my Indonesian Chinese colleagues to Siti Nurhaliza's songs and now he is totally enamoured with her. I find him even slightly annoying these days with his Aku Cinta Pada Mu ringtone bursting out incessantly from his cellphone. I have another Indonesian Chinese colleague who has a huge collection of Siti's pictures from the Internet. It is interesting that a conservative singer such as Siti Nurhaliza could garner such a large following here in Indonesia when local divas like Kris Dayanti and sexy Dangdut grillers like Inul Daratista typically dominate the music scene.

Among the local Indonesian bands, Dewa, Sheila on 7 and Padi are probably the most popular ones. I have become quite a Dewa fan too. Most Indonesians are also familiar with Amy Search, mainly because of his song Isabella, which was quite a hit here back then. Sheila Majid is also quite well-known but Siti Nurhaliza is definitely the number one Malaysian singer here by a wide margin. Ziana Zain? Sorry, no one has heard of her before.

Rembrandt in Chiaroscuro

Was it vanity that resulted in Rembrandt's left-ear deformity? A BBC report brought forth the theory by a British surgeon that the Dutch painter's visibly enlarged earlobe in many of his self-portraits is caused by a botched ear-piercing job. Rembrandt, being the fashionable artist of his time might have attempted to have his ears pierced again after the earlier failure as an ear-ring is visible in some of his later portraits.

This intriguing explaination was given 330 years after the artist's death from careful analysis of his many self-portraits by the surgeon. Rembrandt is famous for his chiaroscuro style, where the sharp contrast of light and shadow helps to highlight key features of his subjects or heighten the drama of a scene. His lighting style is a great influence to many artists including modern film-makers. My favourite director Ridley Scott is especially fond of it.

K.uote:

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There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible.

- Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck (5 April 1916 - 12 June 2003) in To Kill a Mockingbird

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The Roots of Mutiny

A brief sojourn to Makassar brought back memories of other places I have visited before in the past. Upon landing at the airport in Makassar, I was immediately captivated by the clear blue skies. It is a small airport - one where you can alight from the plane and walk the tarmac into the terminal. I suddenly recall another similar airport, which I have almost forgotten about - Pune in India. I had made a short flight from New Delhi to Pune to visit a customer. I later found out that Pune was one of the places where Mahatma Gandhi had spent some time being imprisoned before. It is a quiet retirement place nowadays.

As I approached Makassar town center in a taxi, I am reminded of Georgetown, Penang. I had spent a year of my working live in Penang and have lots of pleasant memories of my days there. Makassar is like Penang, filled with many Chinese shops and there's a sea-front with open air eating stalls not unlike Gurney Drive. There's an old Dutch fort near the harbour called Fort Rotterdam, which is quite well-preserved. It at once reminded me of Fort Cornwallis in Georgetown. And like Penang, there's even a place called Tanjung Bunga! (spelt Tanjung Bungah in Penang).

Sitting there at the lobby lounge of Hotel Imperial Aryaduta (formerly called Sedona Hotel), and looking out at the calm blue waters with schooners and boats majestic in the sunset, I remembered Cebu, Philippines. Cebu is a resort island a short flight away from Manila and I once spent a couple of idyllic days there. Like Makassar, it has stunning azure skies with tranquil seas dotted with green small islets. That in turn triggered memories of another beautiful place in the Philippines: Subic Bay - the abandoned US naval base. I had loved the peace and isolation of the place when I visited it 7 years ago. The waters of the bay were translucent and I could see fish swimming in them. In such places, one begins to understand why the sailors mutinied on the Bounty. The allure and charm of tropical paradises with blue seas, green islands and friendly natives can be quite hypnotic and irresistable.

But there wasn't enough time for me in Makassar to contemplate a return to a life of noble savagery. I had dinner with the customers, worked on my slides and spent the next day in presentations and discussions with them. I returned to Jakarta this evening: Back to that grim, gritty and sweaty world - that fume-choked metropolis of mysteries called Jakarta.

Mission to Makassar

I'll be hopping on a plane to Makassar on the island of Sulawesi. Formerly called Ujong Pandang, Makassar is the gateway to Eastern Indonesia, famed for its spice islands. Besides the Makassarese, Sulawesi is also hom to the Bugis, the Minahasans and the Torajans. The Bugis are reknowned as great seafarers and they have settled all over the Malay archipelago - you can find their settlements even in Selangor and Johor, Malaysia. Of course, Singaporeans would know about Bugis Street and the Bugis Junction shopping mall, the location of their settlement there.

I hope to take this one day business trip of mine to gain a better insight into the history and culture of Indonesia. I have visions of swarthy pirates, Portuguese galleons and armoured Dutch soldiers manning forts; the colour and romance of a time when spice was worth its weight in gold. Nathaniel's Nutmeg by Giles Milton is the book to read about the intrigues and adventures during the golden age of the spice trade in the Malay archipelago.