Getting Global

Grandiose skyscrapers cascade into the slouch of shabby tenements below. Chrome and gloss melt into dirt and tarpaulin. Never had I seen such sharp juxtaposition.

Jakarta, a sprawling metropolis of ten million people. Notorious for gridlocked traffic, annual flooding and diesel soaked air.

Cities are often personified as having a soul. Apparently Jakarta didn’t have one. Well, so I was told.

But here I am, hedged in a congestion of traffic and crammed in a Bajaj - Jakarta’s version of Thailand’s iconic tuk-tuk. An estimated 20,000 Bajaj’s pervade these roads. Their candy orange and blue exteriors add a kaleidoscopic fizz to the otherwise dull thoroughfare.

I marvel at the sight of yet another mall towering into the heavens. If this city had a soul, it was certainly not suspended in these skies.

To find it, I’d need take a more down-to-earth approach.

I look below at the impoverished traceries of tenements, nestled in the shadows of resplendent buildings.

I instruct my driver to take me there.

With astounding efficiency, he swings out of the thicket of traffic and into the sinuous back streets.

We weave chaotically through a labyrinth of lane-ways until we are well and truly in the guts of poverty.

Slackened walls festooned with rotting mildew support sagging roofs. The bitumen is undulating and laced with cracks.

Poverty pulsates. But so too does the ebullience of the people.

Each of them carries out their own humble duty.

A fresh-faced mother supporting a baby on her slender hip attends to a sizzling hot plate.

Juvenile boys stir thick and fragrant broths that secrete alluring scents of sweet, honeyed coconut and piquant spices.

Tendrils of smoke coil from a hissing saucepan, manned by a coterie of greying women. They each flash me identical gapped-toothed grins.

A pair of aged men occupy a small encroachment on the footpath. Their sinewy, dexterous hands move pieces across a well-weathered chessboard.

In a gutter, a man strums an untuned guitar while gaggle of children pool around him.

I smile and wave at them and they burst into nervous fits of laughter. The bravest of the bunch yells out ‘bule’, a term I soon learn means ‘white person.’ This prompts the rest to sing out ‘bule, bule’ as they trail excitedly behind me.

With a throng of giggling children in tow, I wander through the streets like the pied piper.

In this moment, I realise Jakarta doesn’t have a soul. It has 10 million. For its soul is its people.