The day doesn’t always have to start from morning – sometime
they walk from the sunset back to the dawn. One of the best things that excite
me here in Jakarta is the ability to see the world through the eyes of people
who live in silent worlds. Here no one – or may be very few – understand
English. In city I can use the Google translator and type in English to show
them the Indonesian version so that I can eat or buy something. Not
considering the fact that hardest challenge I faced in Indonesia is to find
some vegetarian food. The food chain starts only from fish to top. Though in
villages where there is no coverage, even AI fails, and I become an ancient
human to use the linguistics to close my fingers towards mouth for food and other
intuitive signs to show my needs.
I remember seeing green match box-vans all the way last
night in Jakarta which I assumed to be Taxis. Today my first destination (after
surrundering myself to eat fish to avoid starving)was 2 hours to rural west
Jakarta, for a meeting. Google maps showed me bus routes and I was waiting for
a while but only to realize the taxi-vans were in fact the bus transport. That
was fun – to sit in a match box , which stops every 200m and waits for people
to come from a 100m far and takes and drops people all the way. The streets
looked similar to Bangalore Rural areas. I sat for almost 1 and half hours in
it and came out with a little bent (little more I should say) back bone.
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| Grab scooter rides - Jakarta |
Next part was to grab a Grab scooter – sort of bike version of Uber – to take me to the even ruraler areas of West Java. Google terribly failed. It took us through places where there were no roads and missed that real turns, but thanks to the phone number I had, we managed somehow to make it there. The rider showed all the characters of typical village minds –honest, helpful, welcoming and with a little fear written deep inside.
Past the meeting, the driver of the company CEO I just met
dropped me to a 20 min farther Stasiun Kerata – Train station. Now to
the real Jakarta rush - train was little packed when I started the ride but
eventually became fully packed with almost no space to open the door and dense
platforms. Long queues of Tanahabang station escalators represented the city of
10million people very well. Off the station I was off for a walk- just being
part of the rush – except that only I didn’t know where I am going.
I kept on walking passing the waste-water channels, which seemed like pretty fresh-water canals on maps. Maybe they used to be and later on became victims of industrialization, just like in most developing countries. There were kids playing in them – in contaminated water of black color, seeing which half of the civilized people might even throw-up. Aren’t we all humans? How can someone have more right than others to live on the planet. How can one human being love the same thing others hate? How can kids with everything cry for new toys while the ones without food are happier ? Is greed, the thirst to have more, just a side-effect of the civilized dopamine doses?
To be continued...
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