Bung Karno and the New Jakarta

Abeyasekere in Jakarta: A History (1987) quotes a becak driver in 1977: “I want a governor who can  bring back a time like Sukarno gave us. We were free to make a living and to trade. Not like now: everywhere we’re picked on”.  Abeyasekere states, “the central fallacy which has persisted from 1619 to the present is that it is possible to create a city for the privileged few, cut off from the countryside and the majority of the poor”.   In Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously,  Soekarno mocks the ABS reporter Hamilton’s questions: “Hey, Sukarno, why do you pour out all this money on Jakarta? I will tell you the answer I give. My people cringed for a long time.  They called us a coolie among nations. But now we are on our feet, and the world takes heed. And my people need a capital worthy of them — a capital to stiffen their spines: a world capital.  Do not yet judge my country by New Jakarta, which is not complete. Judge Indonesia by Borobudur, and the beautiful rice-bowl of West Java. Yet wait a little more, and you will see the New Jakarta I am creating. Already it is becoming a Paris, a city of light to inspire struggling humanity”.

What would Bung Karno say now?

 video from YouTube

Get off to a flying start

This is a becak…

 And not a becak to be found…

“In 1970, there were 92,650 becak officially registered in Jakarta; unofficially this was estimated at 150,000. Propelled by at least two shifts per day, this would provide jobs for about 300,000 men, who could conservatively be expected to support another 900,000 people: altogether about 1,200,000 people were dependent on becak-driving.” 

-S. Abeyasekere in Jakarta: A History. 

Becak were banned in Jakarta in 1994.

That was then… this is now…

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