Archive for May 6th, 2008
Will Jakarta ever gonna change ?
Last week i bought a strip comic book about jakarta entitled lagak jakarta ( Jakarta’s Style ). This book describes what jakarta looks like around ten years ago, on 1997-1998, just before we got hit by financial crisis. Since this is a comic strip, it got a lot of funny stuffs, kind of looking in a mirror and laughing at our own nose.
What strikes me is the fact that there are so many things mention in the book is still happens today, for example, ojek ( motorbike taxi ) is still surrounding every stopping bus, and looking at the picture of this from top view, with black dot as ojek and big rectangle as the bus is pretty funny. The traffic is still the same, if not worse. You can still see a lot of expressions from a single driver on daily jakarta traffic, from shock, angry, annoyed, relieve etc..
Even the style of the people is still the same. We still chasing every trend on everything. Mobile phones, cars, houses and fashions.. Well, safe to say people here judge by their looks.
People from across the country is comes to jakarta to get a better life, and find out life is not better in jakarta than at home. It happens over the years and nothing is change. Well when you see flood happens almost every year and nothing has been done than you can expect nothing has been done for everything else.
I don’t see long term plan for jakarta from the government, and i don’t think jakarta will become a different place ten years from now.
But hey, let’s hope i’m wrong.
