The Moderator

It has been a week since the bombs in Jakarta. Investigations are still going on, the victims' families are slowly emerging from the painful facts, and the nation is building up momentum to further fight the terrorist activities through-out the country. This Sunday, there will be an event going on by musicians and other cultural or public figures to speak out against terrorism in Indonesia. They are trying to garner up support from the whole country to speak up and unite against extremist thinking and activities within us. It is also an indirect but bold statement from the Indonesian Muslim majority to reject the effort by the terrorists to freely hijack their religion, Islam. And they are a few more spontaneous and grass-root events like that among the communities in Indonesia that are standing up to highlight their rejection toward this sort of violent and foreign extremist activities in the country. That’s a good sight for me and am proud of it.

Once in a while in the US or European media, there is a always a talk or sort of “cry-out” of the failure or ineffectiveness or slowness of moderate Islam world-wide to contain the extremists within them. While acknowledging the progress of the moderate movements in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, or Turkey, the majority of the global community still expect a more effective (or “fast”) solution to this endemic. But as many experts have said on this issue, there will be no fast way to fight religious extremism like this. The key solution is always a combined effort of pervasive economic and educational strategies. It seems to me, for them, the best way to combat the surgical effectiveness of extremist terror tactics is with a long-term, slow but consistent therapy of common senses.

So in light of the two phenomena that I observed above, Indonesia, I think can be the best bet for moderates in the Islamic world to counter that narrow but potent stream of violent and extremist thinking. I hope the moderate Islam (not the ‘liberal’ one) in Indonesia can be as effective as the moderate majority in the United States in countering the resurgence of an extreme right wing thought in American politics. Well, by the way, what I mean by the moderate majority in the US is more like the NYT readers or NPR listeners although I know most people there wouldn’t think about those two as the “moderate”. One example is the recent case of Henry Gates, the Harvard professor. I am impressed to see how well the moderates there, because of their intrinsic nature, can quickly rebalance the public debates on high-expletive issue like that.

Me Too

A Hope for Baktays

I watched “Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame” on Sunday, it was part of the Kids Film Festival here. So lucky that I was able to watch it, I guess it will be pretty hard to find small film like that without Netflix. Andrea was also there, she volunteered for the event and was part of the translator team, because… as they said in the credit part of the broschure, “she has a good English”, good job ‘ndrea!

The film is quite nice with a simple message of the importance of education. It highlights the impact of war, the madness of Taliban and the American invasion, on the life of children there. It’s good enough to give the general audience a glimpse of the life there. I am sure the reality is multiple times tougher than that. The story is about the journey of a little girl named Baktay (Nikbakht-Noruz) who is innocently trying to go the school despite all the hard circumstances. The girl’s journey is only a day and that makes the 1 hour 20 minutes film felt incredible long. She plays the role quite well. She is just adorable and super cute. The only sad feeling I got after the film is thinking if the living condition of the real young girl (Nikbakht’s) is the same as depicted in the film. She is living in a cave and part of a small village in the desert. Ehm… It is very possible.

Coincidentally, the same day I watched the film, Tom Friedman wrote an article “Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No” and is about a similar subject, children education in Afghanistan. In that article, he wrote about his visit to a small village in Afghanistan with Admiral Mike Mullen to open up a school. He said in the beginning, “I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.” Then after going through his usual style of self thinking and musing in a jocular way of serious subjects, his brain churned out a concluding impression, “I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.”

Nothing I can do in that part of the world other than to hope for a success for Americans and Afghans there in rebuilding the children’s life and thus the country.

717

July 17 will be another sad day for us, the people of Jakarta. This morning right before 8 am, two suicide bombers hit two five stars hotels simultaneously killing more than ten people. I feel the pain of the city, the heartbeat of the nation. The attacks were directly aimed at the international exhibition football match that would be going on in three days between Manchester United from UK and the national team. Each of the two hotels hit will be used by the MU team and the national team. In fact, the bombs almost got the national team if they didn't leave for the 6 am practice. The terrorists are surely gaining lots of ground this time. The match is cancelled. Millions of dollars burned. Our self-pride evaporated. The news spread like the wind. Visitors and travelers flooded the airport trying to leave the city. And the darkest reality is that lifes terminated. Lifes of ordinary honest people who were killed while eating or serving breakfast. It is really a pain, a bereavement. Today, they won and we all lost. So my question is: How do we deal with people who are willing to explode their own heads just to get ours. How do we fight an evil like that?

Election

The election is coming in two more days. It's interesting to see the whole getting up and partaking in the reformation that started in 1998. This round of election we have three candidates fighting for the No 1 post. The debates and discussions are all going pretty intense, a sign the country is re-discovering the joy of democracy after the early one abrutply terminated in the mid 50s. This is also one of the important elections for the global community but it hasn't got as much review as it should. Maybe seconded by the news and worries in Iran and North Korea.

Manhattan

I am back in Sampit now. It is funny how preconception works and how it influence your psyche. The first time in the city my head is filled with negative preconceptions on horror stories and news about the riots that happen here 7 years ago. The second time everything is much different. I am more familiar with the surroundings. I am not as afraid as before.

But maybe that is not the explanation at all. Maybe it is the aftershock effect of my wandering time in the last few months. In January I spent my entire time repacking 10 years of life back to fit into two suitcases. In February I slept in a sleeping bag for a month at my sister’s place in Los Angeles. It’s inconvenient but I enjoy it nevertheless. An interesting metro-nomadic life. I went many times to LA library and visited many interesting architecture. And then in March, plunged myself in Europe and zipping through cities there. In every other day I had to live in a new environment, always alert and self-conscious on everything I encounter. During those times I was so physically disoriented, mentally lonely, intellectually displaced, and spiritually restless. In April I thought the turbulence was over when I landed in a place called Jakarta.

So wrong. That month I went through all the philosophical stupidity of what it means to return, what is change, what is home, and what is shit (just kidding on the last one). No choice because I am interested in it, “stupid-ness” and the philosophical musing of it. And a few days after that I have to go to Kalimantan, another crazy place, a land the size of Germany with road network the size of a 1st century Roman province. In a week I passed through most of the major cities there. Maybe that’s the reason. So maybe it has nothing to do with preconception. Maybe it is just pre-smartness. An aftershock effect on a mentally disrupted person.

Ok back to Sampit. I just want to jot down my thoughts, my incoherence-now (thanks Cissy for the word, like it) for later plans. I visited many cities of various size and range in the last month, right. Sometimes I am so bored in the car seat and just want to bang my head to the window. But I don’t need to because the roads are so bad here and the car window will bang your head for you. Well, all this trips are actually quite interesting if I can use it to observe more closely the development of cities. We know that an urban area always consists of a set of universal elements, the DNA of a city such as commerce, density, infrastructure, politics, dichotomy of private and public spaces, etc.

This should be an opportunity to document it. For example, what is a mall before a mall, how does it develop? There are plenty of proto-malls here, each with it’s own architectural strategies of a commercial building (façade, site, and section). Of course we can know all of these from previous studies and other technical literature in the field. But this is direct observation and has the potential for new conjectures. It is just like how 19th century anthropologists from Europe “discover” primitive tribes in parts of Asia and Africa and are able to postulate new theories on the development human civilizations including the ones in Europe. Parallel to that, maybe I can compile an investigation on cities in Indonesia and fit it into a larger historical genealogy of cities. In this trip, I bring my Delirious New York with me for inspiration. It is amazing in re-reading Koolhaas, how so many ideas or thinking in that book still permeate through many of his projects today. The form of the writing itself (not the content) is already so interesting. It seems like after 1978 that he just used that book as manual for his practice and all his works today.