Word: jakarta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rude if you're pious, you're not supposed to be playing music," Majeed says. "Punks have told [Muslim punks] there's no room for God or religion in punk. If there is, it's like, 'You're a fool, you've been co-opted by the Man.' " (Read "Jakarta: Punk's Last Refuge...
...Behind Jakarta's crisp neoclassical National Museum is the cluttered neighborhood of Kebon Jahé Kober, named for ginger farms that once occupied the area, and for a colonial cemetery some blocks away. There, in a wrinkle of ashen alleyways, the 24-year-old Pramoedya Ananta Toer - Indonesia's most prominent writer, who died in 2006 before getting the Nobel he deserved - lived with his new wife and her family after being released from prison in December 1949, just weeks before Dutch authorities recognized Indonesia's independence. After 2½ years in jail (for being caught with anti-Dutch paraphernalia...
Visitors today to the Indonesian capital might find Pram's take extreme. True, men and boys still relieve themselves in Kebon Jahé Kober's sewers. But the small neighborhood, in the middle of Jakarta's bustle, is an oasis of quiet lanes with socks drying on bamboo poles and friendly bakso (meatball) vendors sucking on spicy, crackling kretek. They'll smilingly guide you to the still standing, ramshackle house of its most famous onetime resident, at No. 8, Gang (Lane) III - although Pram didn't really do much to deserve local affection. Not only did he quickly tire...
...Ketjapi," published in 1956 and the last of the 13 stories, is about a Sundanese debt collector who moves to Jakarta after his marriage fails, his only consolation the melancholic tones of the story's namesake instrument, his future "tattered and full of holes." It's an equally apt description of Indonesia, which had recently emerged a sovereign but brittle country after centuries of Dutch rule, Japanese occupation and four years of revolution. Reflected in each of Pram's protagonists from the fringe - illiterate wash maids, scabietic houseboys, night watchmen, guttersweeps - are the growing pains of a tentative new nation...
...knew it as Koningsplein (King's Square), the area today is a place of easy leisure, of bucolic clumps of crape myrtle and mahogany trees, whose center is the Monumen Nasional - founding father Sukarno's heroic white obelisk. From its observatory deck, you'll see the Kali Besar, Jakarta' big canal dug during the city's prosperous days as a tropical spice-trading port, running north. South is Menteng, the early 20th century planned garden neighborhood where local élite, like the late Suharto's clan, reside. For them Jakarta again is a town of joy, booming with steel, glass...