Tadi Pagi. . .

New Year’s under house arrest: Nyepi in Lombok

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:01:00 +0700

Suranadi, West Lombok—Wind rustles the palm fronds lining the paddy field below. Across the valley, a rooster tentatively crows. Even for village Indonesia, the scene is oddly quiet. Not a bad spot for some enforced reflection.

And that is exactly what I’m in for, this Nyepi – the so-called ‘Day of Silence,’ the first day of the Saka calendar that determines the yearly Balinese ritual cycle. No cooking is allowed. No electricity is used. Everyone in Suranadi, including me, must stay at home. Religious policemen patrol the lanes to fine violators.

That’s okay with me. After living a year in chatty, clangorous Indonesia, I don’t mind this rare, calm day filled with nothing but sunshine and birdsong. As a young reporter launching a career in a new country and about to be married, of course I have anxieties to reflect upon.

Then too, this silence is all the more welcome after the day I spent yesterday: following giant, day-glow parade floats, amidst crushing crowds, in sunstroke-inducing heat to the din of gongs and cymbals. The float imagery is all fangs and claws and disemboweled guts, vaguely drawn from traditional Hindu iconography, with a sprinkling of more contemporary social commentary – an enormous diapered baby to represent over-population, a rat in a necktie to depict corrupt officialdom.

These demons, or Ogoh-ogohs, are not real monsters but rather reminders of the many distractions that keep us from self-reflection, explained one local Brahmin priest, Ide Bagus. And in that way, the Ogoh-ogoh parade and silence of Nyepi are paired like Halloween and All Saints’ Day—a purge of evil followed by a day of holiness.

None of this looks much like the Hinduism I saw growing up in South India which was chaste and vegetarian. But what would you expect from a country that considers Hindu cuisine to be pork sate.

Some Balinese themselves are bothered by this disjunction. At the edge of the parade route, a group of Hare Krishna devotees huddled around an altar where three tonsured Brahmins wafted incense with a peacock feather fan. Down the road, a thirty-year-old Hindu evangelist sold copies of the Bhagvad Gita. “Balinese Hindus today have lost their way,” he said. “They get drunk, they gamble, they eat meat and eggs.” An ex-cock-fighter, he mended his ways to bring himself “closer to the original text of the Vedas.”

But by-the-book Hinduism doesn’t get much traction in Indonesia. In fact, over the last twenty years, the eclecticism and gaudiness of the Ogoh-ogoh tradition has only gotten more lavish. This trend is unlikely to fade either as the artistes behind the effigies come from banjars or neighborhood Hindu youth groups.

As Brahmin Bagus put it, “art is for young people to make and old people to support;” making the month-long process of ogoh-ogoh building a religiously sanctioned riff on the meaning of evil and distraction. And the arts and craft exercise instills a good dose of religious pride, if not co-opting of Hinduism by the young.

On the day of parade, the uninitiated might mistake the event as a multi-kilometer mosh pit. Teenagers decked with heavy eye-liner and bleached blonde hair sport shirts that proclaim them ‘Hindu.’ In bold Helvetica, other shirts beg ‘God Please Blessing Me.’ Pre-teen gamelan players use soda straws to exaggerate their spiked hairdos, head banging as they clang cymbals and gongs. Even the closing burn of effigies is left to just neighborhood youth. At dusk, mothers in more traditional sarongs head home. The young are left to stare on alone as their Styrofoam creations evaporate into the plumes of fire.

Yet there is something truly edifying about the practice of making and purging the world of Ogoh-ogohs, as I learned when I sketched out my own personal demon to burn. The process of linking multiple issues together into one problematic creature to depict gave me a lot of clarity. It also offered the rare adult moment to draw. Burning the painting under the dark, star-lit night sky was a rapid tutorial in detachment.

This morning, I woke with more confidence and clarity about the world.

By afternoon, the religious police relaxed their monitoring. Kids ventured into the empty paddy field to fly kites in the frond-rustling wind. Mothers carried bundles of laundry to the temple spring. They are ready for the New Year to begin.

This piece was written March 12th. The Mataram Ogoh-ogoh parade was March 11th. My parents and I are traveling through the east Indonesia island of Lombok. These are updates from our trip in no particular order.

Word of the Day: Suberdosa

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:42:09 +0700

Nope, this is not a nouveau cusine version of the Tamil dosa flatbread.

It’s Bahasa Maluku for “sinner”.

I heard it a lot in the week and a half I spent on Seram Island. It applies for a lazy man, or for a man who has just given a woman a once over with his eyes.

Berdosa is the Indonesian action verb “to sin”. Su is malukan slang for already.

Perhaps this is common in all of Eastern Indonesia but Malukan street talk usually means words without suffixes. Their counterparts from the western end of the archipelago drop the s in sudah (already/over) when chatting with friends. Malukans say su.

Where Dances Kill

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:22:00 +0700

Nunusaku mountain, says the seventy-four-year-old ex-Raja of Waraka. We’re sitting on his front porch, perched on damp velvet day sofas below a silver tinsel Christmas tree. Just a hundred meters off, the Banda Sea rolls soft waves ashore.

The Raja (Indonesian for king) is smoking the second of his three daily packs of cigarettes and telling the origin myth of all the tribes of Seram.

It starts as all good stories do, with a woman. Her name was Rapihainuele, which means Lady of the Moon, and she was the princess of Nunusaku.

She had thigh-length hair and many suitors.

Twelve captains in particular were absolutely smitten with the Moon Lady. And one day, while the king (her father) was out, they tried to impress her with their dancing skills.

Surrounding her in a loose circle, they twirled. Each put on a display more beautiful and flamboyant than the other so as to win over the princess’s heart.

Their toes kicked deep into the earth in passion. Dust flew in a rising storm around their beloved. So deep in their own frenzy were the captains that they did not realize that the footprint of their collective promenade had imprinted a lake, a pool of water deep enough to sink the princess.

When the king came home, he asked where his daughter was. And only then, did the astonished suitors realize that Rapihainuele was gone. She had disappeared below the surface of their frenzy, their display. She had drowned.

In embarrassment and fear of the king’s wrath, the captians fled, Each chose a different direction and found themselves starting tribes of their own in separate corners of Seram island.

The captain who became the founding king of Warakah followed a river down to the ocean and there set up this spot with where his descendants would one day retire to chain smoking before tinsel Christmas trees.

A visit to the current Raja’s is even stranger. Here, tall doorways are hung with golden curtains. The ancestral loincloth emblem graces the ceiling trim.

Be careful to not offend the royal court (pictured here in the village ceremony house. The head of the traditional police system is on the younger man on the right).

Robbers, adulterators and anyone else deemed to be in the wrong by the village court system gets lashed five times with a stingray tail.

The last person to receive punishment had slandered the king in 2011.

A Christmas note from Seram—one of the islands in East Indonesia’s Maluku or Spice Island...

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 23:36:43 +0700

A Christmas note from Seram—one of the islands in East Indonesia’s Maluku or Spice Island cluster.

I spent two weeks here, directly north of Australia, where sago is the staple diet; the largest animal looks a short blue ostrich; And old men spend the evenings on the porch discussing pygmies in the forest.

Between my work as part of a video production team and patchy internet, I couldn’t get these blogs up till now. Though not “current,” I hope they prove entertaining.

Pictured above are local girls practicing a traditional fire dance for a Christmas performance.

Below are two of the three wise men from a local nativity scene.

Catching Birds to Keep From Falling Asleep

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 22:36:00 +0700

Squatting in the path between tree groves, the man peers in at the song thrush he has just captured.

“Kerja untuk biar tidak tidur,” he explains with a half grin. Work that keeps me from falling asleep.

A farmer by trade, usually he works the slopes of Gunung Salak but December is the offseason. During this time, he catches wild birds and sells them in the local market.

Mist drifts down the mountain behind us. By motorbike the hullabaloo Bogor traffic is only a half hour ride, but from here it seems a world away. His seems a pretty tension-free way to make a living.

Another hour along a forested path, at the base of a 20-foot waterfall that creates its very own gusty weather is another man. He explained his job similar to the way the bird catcher does. A warung [food stall] owner, he carves stone amulets while waiting for customers to feed roasted corn, or instant noodles and coffee.

Santai [relaxed], Indonesians call this lifestyle. Tranquilo in Costa Rican Spanish. Just a step away from boredom, work to do to keep from falling asleep. A reason to justify sitting in the woods.

Jakarta Post article: Indonesia’s for-profit conservationists

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:23:34 +0700

Jakarta Post article: Indonesia’s for-profit conservationists:

Agus’s soaring vision for the future goes beyond cap and trade. He urges Indonesian concession holders to see beyond mere carbon sequestration. “Water, biodiversity, ecotourism, these are things that can be capitalized. If we just focus on carbon, we ignore these other values.”

Immobile Cica

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:59:04 +0700

This gecko sat on our kitchen floor for a full 12 hours.

After a poke, it registered alive but perhaps too young to move.

A quick internet search revealed nothing about the age at which geckos start walking but it looked similar in size to a photograph of a ten-minute-old one raised in captivity.

*Cica is indonesian for gecko.

TEDx comes to the southside: Jakarta Post piece

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:31:00 +0700

TEDx comes to the southside: Jakarta Post piece :

Handspun batik, Twitter and fighting illegal logging were among the disparate topics that shared a stage over six hours at South Jakarta’s first TEDx conference.

Puja Incorporated

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:37:16 +0700

Durga Puja, the biggest festival in West Bengal, is mythologically the time of year when the mother Goddess Durga visits her ancestral home and triumphs over the forces of evil.

Tearing up the streets and tapping into the electricity grid, communities in Kolkata build pandals—structures that house Durga and her god-children during their ten day visit.

As communities vie for the best pandal (and an ever-expanding list of awards), corporate India has put its weight behind the festival. Imperial Blue whiskey, Tata Docomo internet, and Lux undergarments all sponsored pujas this year and took credit by plastering the streets with linoleum advertising banners.

With the corporate sponsorship, budgets have grown and the pandals have become bigger and more elaborate. Many cost over 50 lakh rupees (about 100,000 US dollars), and construction can take two to three months with teams of 20 to 40 workers.

This year, one puja even became a tool of West Bengal’s foreign diplomacy. Flanked by dragons, a giant bronze Buddha-face towered over the display of Durga and her family. The consul generals from Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Thailand attended the inauguration of this Buddhist-themed puja. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee rolled up to deliver a speech. Tibetan Buddhist monks and a dance troupe, invited by pandal organizers from Darjeeling, looked on.

Still, there are hold-outs. For example, Babuda, the General Secretary of a south Kolkata neighborhood, opts out of the corporate puja and instead relies on money from his neighbors to fund a modest pandal. In front, families lick kulfi as Babuda explains, “This is a time for the community to unite. Why do we need such a big display?”

And even at the increasingly lavish shrines, the actions of visiting devotees remain the same. A father holds his daughter up for a better view. Teenagers capture the moment on camera. And many close their eyes to the crowd and structure to pay respect to the goddess within.

Photos

A sculptor in the north Kolkata neighborhood of Kumartuli paints the murthi depicting evil.

Murthis are transported through the streets of Kolkata.

A giant bronze Buddha in southern Kolkata.

Durga and her family sit on a lotus below a beehive.

With its theme of scales, this pandal in Shyam Bazaar compels visitors to question the weight of what they hold dear.

Papier-mâché birds make a light overhead detail in one pandal.

Durga portrayal takes on the abstract as thousands of the goddess’ face form the scales of a fish.

A Brahmin offers evening prayers to Maa Durga at the pandal in Babuda’s neighborhood.

Amidst a boisterous crowd, one lady worshipper finds a peaceful moment to gaze up at Maa Durga.

*Note: Apologies for this post going out of chronological order. It comes from Melati’s visit to Brian in Kolkata during Durga Puja in October. It is a rare collective effort during these months apart.

Married in Green

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 07:42:00 +0700

Last week, one of the video-editors from my office got married.

It was a very green affair. Yes, they did use ceramic plates but what I’m referring to is the color, the shade you might associate with the Javanese Queen of the South Sea, Nyi Roro Kidul.

Swimmers and surfers that brave the rough surf of Indian Ocean along Java’s south coast are advised not to wear green. Legend has it that the haughty princess-goddess that lives in the marine depths below sucks those sporting her favorite hue into her murky underworld to serve as guards, servants, anything that will allow her to view their colored clothing.

Aris’s wedding was in Bogor though, many miles inland from Nyi Roro Kidul’s realm. I think the bridal palette had more to do with the Islamic take on the Garden of Eden or the Prophet Mohammed himself. Green was supposedly his favorite color because it sat in the middle of the VIBGYOR range and therefore advocated moderation, according to this informative read from Slate.

The reception took place in a kindergarten at the end of a series of twisted gangs (alleyways off the main road where much of Indonesia’s city folk live).

The newly-weds sat in heavily padded chairs before a wall of leafy creepers.

Her hair was bundled tight under coils of sash. Aris sported a batik sarong over his pants. The loudspeakers outside blared tunes strangely reminiscent of western holiday music.

As guests, we came in, shook the hands of the bride, the groom and their extended families.

Aris asked me when I was going to get married. “Menurut orang indonesia, sudan nikah setahun,” I fumbled. According to Indonesian standards, I’ve been married a year already…

Perhaps that’s a cop out but I’m not sure how else to explain the bearded man I’ve been tromping around Asia with. Living together before marriage is still taboo in Indonesia.

At the end of the wall of handshakes, we turned right and walked down another wall lined with a buffet. Potatoes in red sauce, chicken curry and meatballs with vegetables. Dessert was cupcakes.

Everyone sat under a big outdoor canopy, leaving the couple in the kindergarten. The earth, still drenched from rain the night before, soaked through our sandals as we ate and chatted.

After the food, and another parade through the leafy kindergarten for handshakes, we posed for a picture and went home before the 4 pm rain.

Short and sweet.

Here’s a couple more photos from the day:

Another co-worker and his family

And a guest enjoying a smoke

Our neighborhood Corpse Lily

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:03:00 +0700

“Cewek atau cowok,” someone in the crowd yells out to the kneeling biologist. “Is it male or female?”

Arms on the ground, the biologist faces her rear-end to us and focuses on guiding a dentist mirror along the innards of the newly bloomed Rafflesia. She wrinkles her nose and squints.

This Saturday the Bogor Botanical garden announced the blooming of one of its Rafflesias—a once-in-fifty-year happening.

Flowers of the genus Rafflesia are commonly known as corpse lilies—a reference to their scent and the pollinating flies that flock around these fantastical inflorescences.

Native to the southeast Asian countries of Thailand, the Malay peninsula, the Philippines and Indonesian archipelago, these parasitic plants are best known for three things: the size of their flowers (between a television and a small satellite disk); how rare it is to see them (the parasitic plants tap into the root system of the Tetrastigma wild grape genus, blooming once every 50-80 years) and their smell.

In 2007, the Bogor Botanical garden started to cultivate a Western Javanese strain of the plant, Rafflesia patma. And their pruning and preening has since yielded two rounds of blooms.

According to a stub on the Rafflesia genus on Wikipedia, botanical information on this particular species was first collected on the “Alcatraz” of Java.

Past inmates to Kembangan Island include Indonesian literary icon Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Tommy Suharto and those linked to the 2002 Bali bombing.

Strangely enough, these plants, on their half-century flowering cycle, are sexually dimorphic. This means gendered, having male and female flowers.

And this is what the kneeling biologist in the garden is researching. The male flowers have bristles under their anther disk while the females don’t. Which one was this new specimen?

Sexual dimorphism would seem evolutionarily unfortunate for a species that rarely blooms.

The signboard at the garden said that the trait was actually an evolutionary defense. Parasites that live off the root system of another species, the plants only bloom once their host is fully mature, an indication that their habitat was a healthy enough to sustain a new generation of Rafflesia.

This might shed light on the plants’ rankness. Only able to find a sexual partner twice in a century might force a plant to bring out its strongest perfume.

Also on view at the Botanical garden, a strange array of Asian politicians with orchids:

Here’s Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, admiring a plant through his shades.

Another of Sukarno’s daughter and Indonesia’s fourth president, Megawati, touring the garden grounds with Kim Jong-Il!

Even larger flowers.

And my landlady Anny fixing to capture what I’d like to say is a golden doll for no other reason than the strange name.

Eid Mubarak. Here’s a Kolkata moment to mark the occasion. Yup,...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:00:00 +0700

Eid Mubarak.

Here’s a Kolkata moment to mark the occasion. Yup, two boys and a sacrificial goat on a hand pulled rickshaw.

On a short work visit to India, Brian and I visited the old Chinatown section of Kolkata. For those in the know, this is in the neighborhood near the Armenian church.

In the space of 30 minutes, the narrow lanes brought us to many scenes. A synagogue on the national register without enough patrons to fill a service. A mosque so full, the congregants stopped traffic during Friday prayer. And a dilapidated Chinese temple with a plaque dedicated to sheng jin—raw gold, with fresh incense set in front of it.

Posts on all coming shortly.

You know you are in India when you see a homeless boy share a...

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 17:17:00 +0700

You know you are in India when you see a homeless boy share a stoop to sleep on  with his father. So narrow is the section in front of the defunct bank, one of them sleeps sideways.

Yet, 400 meters away, a mere four cents will buy sweets that melt in your mouth evoking home, familiarity  and comfort.   

Temporary joy is so cheap here. But, so many find themselves wanting.

A piece we wrote on the Bajaus in Wakatobi for Al Jazeera

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 22:02:26 +0700

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/10/20121027184859926.html

Here is Melati conducting interviews for this piece in the village of Sampela on our trip to Sulawesi in August.

Java, where the flowers are only temporarily yours

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 20:37:00 +0700

Earlier this week, a man up the street died.

He was a well-connected banker, judging from the rows of flower-bedecked styro-foam boards given in condolence. Among the well wishers were branches of HSBC and members of the Indonesian government banking system.

A canopy tent was set up, stretching out of the family home and across the street. Java is the most populous island in the world. In the Greater Jakarta Metro area, houses sit snug against one another. Walls are shared. And ceremonies often spill into the streets.

By now, I have steered my motorbike through weddings, circumcisions, engagement parties and funerals; stopping only when hosts walk cups of sweet tea out the door to their guests who sit in fold up chairs on the other side of the street.

This ceremony though was too important for such behavior.

Police stood guard at the head of the road a full 24 hours. Lines of black cars blocked evening traffic one street over.

But by commuter hour the next day, school kids were re-pinning the funerary flower boards to spell their names. “Wiwit” and “Eko” had picked apart “Sri Tatang Purnomo MS.”

And just like that, my memory of Tatang’s funeral went from rows of black Mercedes to a name picked away in jest by children.

Traffic was flowing again.

Live New Yorker cartoon moment

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:03:00 +0700

Today, on the way to work, I saw a little girl in a long checkered dress and a black headscarf.

She was wearing a fine-featured, traditional Javanese dance mask usually associated with Arjuna of the epic tale, Mahabarat.

As I passed her on the quiet side-street leading to my office, she lifted her head to the golden SUV in front of her and stomped.

It was like a New Yorker cartoon without a caption.

Faced with Fundamentalism

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 23:40:00 +0700

On the heels of a weekend of protests to the Innocence of Muslims video across the globe, Indonesian Fundamentalist group, Islamic Peoples’ Forum (FUI) and Islam Defenders’ Front (FPI) launched their own demo in Jakarta Monday.

The hundreds’ strong procession—started at a busy roundabout in front of Plaza Indonesia, informally considered ground zero for protests in the Indonesian capital, and ended with lobbing petroleum bombs at the US Embassy. Whereupon the police turned water cannons on the gathered protesters.

I was on a Jakarta errand and stuck around till 1:30 to see the start of the march.

Men, in white combat boots and berets, stood poolside at the Plaza Indonesia roundabout’s fountain. Leaders urged the crowd to run laps, in an attempt “to keep energies up”.

On a truck, baby-faced boys dangled a banner with “Amerika teroris” scrawled across the front. Terrorist America.

“Warriors, gather in the front,” the announcer yelled. “Take a bottle of drinking water if you need it.”

A man, with a green shirt but no arms, milled among the protesters. His face set in a grimace, the better to carry the blue begging bucket held between clenched teeth.

At demonstrations in the past, I have chatted with participants to get a sense of who are the people behind the public message. And these people dressed in white—taking off from work Monday morning and headed to the US embassy—seem particularly interesting.

Today though, as one of only a few women on the scene not in a headscarf, and perhaps the only American (albeit incognito), I chose to remain a silent observer.

By 2:10, the crowd has yelled, washed their feet in the skuzzy fountain and marched on to the US embassy to perform afternoon prayer (sholat) and burn the American flag, as far as I can gather from one of the announcers.

At the last moment, I worked up the courage to talk with a lady in a white jilbab holding a “USA go to hell” sign and a fake Versace purse in the other.

She is a middle-aged housewife who identified herself as Dia S—Indonesian for she. Dia says she joined the march today to be an inspiration to Muslims everywhere.

I asked her if she knew what her sign translated to.

“Amerika, kalian bergila?” She posited. Americans, you are crazy.

A sparsely populated island ringed by white sand beach, Hoga is a remote tropical paradise. Most...

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:55:00 +0700

A sparsely populated island ringed by white sand beach, Hoga is a remote tropical paradise.

Most people live on the nearby island of Kaledupa or in the Bajau fishing community of Sampela. This includes an old man with a blue hulled boat.

We call him Pak, Indonesian short form for the honorific, Bapak— a term used for all older men.

Most days, Pak wears a worn collared t-shirt provided free from the Partai Democrat Eastern Indonesia and a baseball cap that says ‘crew’.

Yesterday, we walked with him a few kilometers down the beach to a small village of ten houses. Children were mean with each other. Chatty ladies washed clothes at the well, babies on their hips. Fishing nets with Styrofoam floats lay stored under the thatch-roofed huts. Coconut palms ring the village and chickens peck all around it.

We tried on Pak’s machete belt, secured by a 1945 dutch coin. Pak’s kebun (garden) is near here and he stays in this house sometimes rather than going back to the kampong in Kaledupa. When we returned to our beach shack, we shared with Pak our dates and cashews, of which he took small bites, chewing slowly, intentionally.

Skinny-dip Snorkeling

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 11:43:50 +0700

Photos Unavailable

Feasting with Royalty: Our Photo Essay in Jakarta Post

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 16:06:00 +0700

Indonesians Royals Gather