FLY, BIRD, FLY

A  Passion for Pigeons                                             

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. John Gillespie Magee 

They hurtle in at wingsnap speeds, trusting totally in their handlers with a faith to inspire the pious.

Like cruise missiles they move faster than the eye can adjust, brown blurs against green paddy, guided by a system so sophisticated that science has yet to fully understand the mechanism.

In the final nanosecond they hit the brakes, fanning tail, reversing thrust, opening feathers and cluttering their aerodynamic shape with flaps and landing gear.  Just like a Boeing – or should that be the other way around? One tiny misjudgement and they’ll be in a pie by nightfall.

To suggest someone has a bird brain is a compliment – provided the bird is a homing pigeon.

Every week or so up to 100 men and boys ride their motorbikes and bicycles to the flat ricefields of Pakis on the plains below Mount Semeru, the highest peak in Java.  Here they train their birds to obey.

On their backs the men hump multi-storey cages, more like dolls’ apartments, containing pairs of pigeons, the sexes apart. All gather on a small bank between the rice seedlings to sort out the afternoon’s business.

After a while selected birds are re-caged and biked 800 meters distant where they’re flung into the sky.

Back at the base the owners wave the bird’s mates in the air and call the racers home. Every fancier has his own color, technique and cry. “Ri-ri-ri” is popular – so is “whoosh, whoosh” and “hoi-hoi.” They also jump and flap their arms a lot, but never become airborne.

Pigeons overseas have been clocked at 140 kilometers an hour over short distances. On marathons, around 80 kph. They are the fastest long-distance creatures on the plant.

Like a naughty teenager the odd bird decides to test its freedom, by-passing the catchers in the rice, joyously flying up and almost away.  But after a couple of circuits to check the alternatives the wayward youth quickly calculates that being back with the mob is better than a life alone pecking trash among humble sparrows.

“They’re faithful birds like us, not polygamous,” said Dion, 61.  He’s been a birdman since schooldays, mesmerized by the mysteries of flight and the homing instinct.  “I’ve got ten pairs back at the house.  It’s a good excuse to get out and into the country. A great hobby.”

It’s also an expensive one.  To stay in top condition they’re fed kibbled corn, red rice and green soy beans. Spending Rp 50,000 (US$ 4.30) a day on a small flock is common, tiny by Western standards but double the income of an estimated 40 million Indonesians.

A promising young bird can cost Rp 100,000 (US$8.60), a champion several million rupiah. Fine if the pigeon lives long and breeds often, but not if it gets sick.

Along with racers, trader Joko Prayitno (Doro) also deals in tumblers (pigeons that fly high and then appear to fall out of the sky), white fantails and other pretties sought to romanticise wedding venues.

When The Jakarta Post visited his aviary he’d just bought a mixed bunch of 80 birds for Rp 3.8 million (US$330). He seemed relaxed about the transaction, reckoning keen buyers would soon appear despite an absence of advertising.

That’s because he’s well known among the avian fraternity for his prizewinners. Apart from trophies he also collected a 21-inch television set, which his birds never get to see. As pigeons are known for their intelligence they’d probably turn the thing off.

 Back at the training paddy Didik, 55, explained the absence of women: “This is men’s business,” he said, “girls don’t get involved.  My wife doesn’t mind – she knows where I am.  What else can a man do?  Keep fish or rabbits? 

“That’s not exciting and there’s not much companionship. However more now prefer to play with their motorbikes.”

The young birds start in pigeon kindergarten, being released just a few meters from their owner.  Gradually the distance increases till the birds graduate as senior homers and are ready for the big races. 

Pigeons from several lofts are taken to a distant town and released.  They usually circle a couple of times, and then head home. With the state of Indonesia’s roads it’s not uncommon for a grumpy pigeon to be tapping its foot and waiting with folded wings for a feed when his owner eventually arrives.

Even in Java’s crowded kampongs there’s usually space for a pigeon loft atop the house. Here a birdman can get away from it all, be himself, bond with his feathered friends, tidy their nests, repair their cages - a fiddler on the roof pondering one of the great mysteries of nature: 

How can a 500 gram bird fly hundreds of kilometers across country it has never seen before, dodge storms, hawks, powerlines and other hazards, and then find its home among the millions of terracotta tiles below?

The theory is that homing pigeons have natural global positioning systems that help them navigate, maybe using magnetic fields though no scientist is totally sure. Solar flares can disorientate. Distances of up to 1,800 kilometers have been recorded.

Indonesians seem to be closer to their pigeons than their counterparts overseas who may have lofts holding hundreds of breeders.

If the wives of Indonesian fanciers get treated like their husbands’ pigeons they’d be happy ladies indeed, constantly stroked and handled with love and care.  Certainly they’re in splendid condition, far better than their nicotine-stained owners.

However watching them strut around, puffing out their plump chests and checking out their neighbors seemed to challenge the idea that they’re monogamous, though both sexes stay together to raise their young.  I’m writing here about the birds, not the men.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 5 August 2014)

THE TOUGH ROAD TO ORGANIC FARMING

From poo to you

In East Java Duncan Graham finds a farmer planning to make his business totally organic, even though consumers are still unprepared to pay the premium prices the products attract overseas.

………………………….

Organic produce is readily available in Europe, North America and Australasia where certification schemes are in place and policed.  That’s not the situation in Indonesia.

A few specialist health food shops in Jakarta and Bali, usually in areas where foreigners live, sell foods labelled as organic.  You’re unlikely to find these in the traditional markets; the fruit and vegetables may well have been grown without the use of artificial fertilizers or chemical sprays, but they aren’t marketed as such.

Masngut Imam Santoso (left), the high priest of zero-waste farming, wants to change this situation so all food is grown organically. As an advert for his products he needs no digital enhancements, looking lean, fit and lively.

He sits in his pendopo (a traditional high-ceiling house built around four timber pillars) in the village of Srengat near Blitar.  Beneath huge portraits of Javanese nobles he remembers back 70 years when as a five-year old he had to cut grass for the family farm’s livestock.

“It was hard but it taught me discipline,” he said. “I was brought up with the work ethic.  It’s part of the teachings of Islam.  God loves traders – that’s in the Holy Koran.  It also says we must use time efficiently.

“God also helps those who help themselves. Sadly this truth isn’t always applied.”

In the days when little Masngut was discovering which side of the scythe was sharp, the farm had about 125 laying hens and five cows.  Now it has 15,000, plus 8,000 ducks and 400 cattle – all on about ten hectares.

Masngut calls his system “natural” and he’s written a book on his ideas, Mau Kaya? Ayo Saya Ajari (Want to be rich? Let me teach you) Integrated Farming.

Others might label it “intensive”, “recycling” or “sustainable”. The terms aren’t clearly defined, making it difficult for consumers to know what they’re buying, particularly when there’s no independent credible certifying authority regularly auditing farmers.

“We’re about 80 per cent organic,” Masngut said.   “We’re working towards 100 per cent, but it takes time. Indonesians aren’t ready for this yet and I doubt they will be in my lifetime. We persist because it’s profitable.”

Indeed it is. What was once a small family holding has become a major semi-industrial enterprise employing almost 200 across all sectors.

The Santoso farm and its diverse products have attracted the interest of universities and government departments.  For several years Masngut toured campuses giving seminars, but now insists students come to him.

“Theory is fine,” he said, “but there’s nothing as effective as seeing for yourself.  This is why I’ve been overseas to see how they get high yields from animals and the soil. Breeding is important (he has cows from Australia) but so is feeding.”

According to the Ministry of Agriculture about 140 million people work in primary production. Not all own their own land, often having less than a hectare or are landless and have to labor for others. 

By North American and Australasian standards the Santoso farm is small, but it’s highly productive because of the way it’s run.

A processing plant using corn straw and high-protein soy bean waste bought from a tofu factory is used to make dry feed for the chickens.  These are kept in battery cages alongside fish ponds. Insects that thrive in the birds’ manure are fed to the fish.

The rest of the droppings are trucked to a factory where they are sorted, dried and sterilised in a furnace before being bagged in 40 kilogram sacks and sold as organic fertiliser.  The washdown from the cowsheds is used to irrigate fields of corn and rice.

Some of the waste is refined and sold as a concentrated liquid fertiliser – five liters for Rp 40,000 (US $ 3.40), which is more expensive than milk, as Masngut pointed out. He also plans to use the manure to produce biogas to fire the furnace.  At the moment coal is imported from Kalimantan.

Although he went to Malang’s Brawijaya University Masngut never completed his economics degree, preferring instead to boost the farm’s output.

“I saw the Brantas (East Java’s longest watercourse that sustains 12 cities and regencies) and its many tributaries,” he said. “I noticed how they all come together to make one great river. I thought that farming should be like that, with different produce coming together to make one system.

“I also like the English proverb – don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

“In Java we have a proverb: If you have two eggs just eat one and keep the other to hatch a chick.  But too many eat both eggs.  It’s difficult to change mindsets – the Javanese need to be more ambitious. They should be rich. (Masngut is Javanese.)

 “I’d seen how fish like bugs (left)  so developed the chicken-waste to fish-food system. And from that one thing led to another. It’s not a question of having more land, but using what we have more efficiently.

“It’s difficult to get farmers to follow my example.  They’re conservative people, slow to take up different ways of doing things.  They don’t trust the government and most of them don’t have the capital.  They need low-interest loans.  I’ve been telling the bureaucrats this for years, but they won’t listen.”

Another problem is security acceptable to the banks.  In many rural districts farmers hold land under the adat (customary law) system, where ownership is acknowledged by the community

Masngut rejected the suggestion that he should be labelled an inventor. “I just observe, and think and apply,” he said.

“Another factor driving me is that I’ve never liked the food you get in shopping malls – it gives me headaches because of the chemical additives and preservatives.”

(First published in J Plus 3 August 2014)

THE ESSENTIAL INTRODUCTION TO THE ARCHIPELAGO

The Wisdom of a Wanderer    

                                            

Thankfully Elizabeth Pisani is now back at her public health consultancy in London.

Had she remained in Indonesia a chance encounter in some remote village could have tempted some despairing hack to spike her drink with a potion strong enough to scramble her syntax.

How else to make the author of Indonesia Etc. understand the envy of others?  The lady’s an American epidemiologist. What business does a lab rat in a white coat have revealing the archipelago’s mysteries and contradictions with lavish applications of clarity, wit and style?  

Note to Immigration: Ban this woman to protect the vapid mutterings of resident writers recycling shadow puppet metaphors and ‘dark forces’ clichés.

Yet Dr Pisani wasn’t always at home among the viruses.  Before shaking test tubes she was shaking up Reuters’ office in Jakarta.  That was in 1988 when it seemed that sphinx Soeharto would remain forever.

The newbie was 24 and had studied Chinese at Oxford University.  She’d backpacked five years earlier and found the Republic “somewhat schizophrenic”. She added Indonesian to her other languages.

She was also gifted with gall – an essential quality for all serious reporters. At a cocktail party she confronted General Benny Moerdani and asked if she was being denied access to Aceh because the military was killing civilians.

She got her pass, though looking back such effrontery now makes her feel “queasy”. The Defense Minister had overseen the extra-judicial killing of criminals in Java and was “not a man to be crossed lightly”.

Why didn’t her editors superglue this multi-faceted gem to her keyboard?  Maybe they felt threatened.  Perhaps the journalism on offer didn’t provide sufficient intellectual excitement.  Interviewing humbugs is a downside of the job.

So she returned to university and shifted to public health, becoming an international expert on AIDS. In Indonesia she worked with the Ministry of Health.

Her 2008 book The Wisdom of Whores was a kick in the groin to those arguing for a moral approach to stop the spread of sex diseases. Unsurprisingly her views haven’t been well received by the Just Say No ideologues.

Earlier this decade she took time out from talking HIV to revisit Indonesia and upload her tales while travelling. Those fortunate enough to have found her blog will be delighted to know her insights have been enhanced and pressed between hard covers.

Unfortunately the book is being promoted as a list of quirky encounters, which is wrong. It’s much deeper and far more substantial; entertaining without being trite, informative yet never tiresome.

The title refers to Indonesia’s Declaration of Independence.  This should have been a magisterial statement hewn from the granite mountains of soaring hopes.  Sadly we get foothill prose: ‘Matters relating to the transfer of power etc. will be executed carefully and as soon as possible.’

“Indonesia has been working on that ‘etc’ ever since,” Dr Pisani notes.  Indeed. The 1945 event was momentous and the resolve grand but the document remains a work in progress.

Travel writing is rarely done well. Proof is on Internet sites where tourists rabbit on about their experiences.  These tell more about the paucity of visitors’ vocabularies than their appreciation of history and culture. ‘Superb’, ‘very nice’ and ‘just lovely’ add nothing to our understanding of difference.

That’s not the case with Indonesia Etc. Although built round the author’s 13 month wanderings west from Papua, the references to her earlier experiences as a reporter, including revisiting interviewees, give her surveys substance.

With her language and people skills she knows how to get inside stories, yet after several months of back country frustrations she was almost ready to give up.  Paradoxically such honesty gives her work more authority.

Twenty years earlier in Aceh she’d been criticised by both sides in the brutal civil war for allegedly biased reporting. Now she sees former enemies embrace and is stunned by the turnaround.  “This really did my head in,” she writes.  “It’s like a senior Israeli general becoming campaign manager for Hezbollah.”

But this recalibration of relationships is classic Indonesian, and seldom understood by outsiders. Likewise with corruption: “Patronage is the price of unity.” That will jar with Transparency International. “Adat (traditional customary law) and education are incompatible,” will rile anthropologists but this writer can stand her ground.

Anecdotes illuminate wisdoms, reveal truths.  Some are funny – like the Intel (intelligence) operator who calls her hotel room to ask if she’s seen the skeleton key he lost. Many are just plain sad.

Other arts include the ability to make statistics memorable.  On infrastructure:  “Even landlocked countries such as Zimbabwe, Switzerland and Botswana reported better access to ports.” 

On communications: “Around 64 million Indonesians use Facebook – that’s more than the entire population of the UK.  But 80 million live without electricity (all of Germany) and 110 million live on less than two dollars a day (all of Mexico).”

This is the book that probes Indonesia without destroying the allure.  It’s written breezily by a “hard-drinking occasional smoker who could flirt at a bar in several languages and was competitive, even in yoga”, yet retains academic authority.  Outraged by some apparently flippant aside?  If there’s no supporting reference in the text it will be on her website.

Making this book so valuable is the author’s candour.  Yes, the people can be a delight and the land is often lovely, but those who step off the tourist track know other paths are not so pleasant. Her particular dislikes include dissembling politicians and hoons hanging around to exploit the weak. 

Dr Pisani is neither Pollyanna nor pessimist. “Like all Bad Boyfriends Indonesia certainly has its downsides,” she writes before taking a swipe at corrupt cops, bastard bureaucrats and capricious governments.

“But Indonesia’s upsides – the openness, the pragmatism, the generosity of its people, their relaxed attitude to life – are ultimately the more seductive traits, and the more important.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 4 August 2014)

 

WAITING TIME, WORRYING TIMES

The count’s not over                                                        

As foreshadowed in On Line Opinion earlier this month, Indonesians are facing a potentially explosive situation with no clear winner from the 9 July direct vote for a new president.

But thank God for Ramadhan.  Literally.  The Islamic fasting month is the principal reason volcanic chaos hasn’t erupted following the keenly contested result.

It’s not easy seething over statistics when hunger gnaws and the mind is supposed to be concentrating on matters pious, not political.

The liberal - progressive’s poster boy, mellow Joko Widodo (Jokowi) remains in front by about five percentage points according to exit polls labelled ‘credible’ by Western observers. Not so says his rival, former three-star general and tungsten-tough Prabowo Subianto.  He stoutly asserts his polling reverses Jokowi’s reported lead.

The disputed figures are the result of the so-called ‘quick counts’, not the official result which should be released on 22 July.  Whatever the determination, appeals to the Constitutional Court are expected - so no winner declared till late August.

Even then a settle down is unlikely should Prabowo lose. Few believe that the alleged human rights abuser discharged from the army for exceeding his authority will shake the winner’s hand, then gracefully retire to breed Portuguese Lusitano warmbloods.

Prabowo, 62, campaigned with foam-flecked intensity for a nostalgic return to the simple and certain era of his former father-in-law, the kleptocrat dictator Soeharto who ruled Indonesia for 32 years till toppled in 1998 by pro-democracy students.

Prabowo’s grandstanding campaign style, which included reviews of his uniformed ‘troops’ from the saddle of a high-stepping stallion, reminded historians of Il Duce, the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini. One French journalist cleverly dubbed him Putin van Jawa.

Admitting defeat won’t come easy for a patrician who believes only he was born to rule the world’s fourth largest nation, not some provincial pleb.  Jokowi, a former furniture salesman and small town mayor turned Jakarta Governor, campaigned on a ‘mental revolution’ platform. This included reforming the bureaucracy, embracing modern business practices, eliminating nepotism and responding to the voices of ordinary Indonesians.

He appealed because he was seen as a clean break from the corrupt and incestuous Jakarta oligarchy that’s long controlled an archipelago of 250 million people, most of them Muslim.

Prabowo has already formed a coalition that dominates the Legislative Assembly (DPR).  It includes the hard-right Islamic parties and could frustrate a Jokowi-led attempt to advance reform policies even if he’s given the people’s mandate to do just that.

So far the protests have been verbal because voters are more concerned with their religious and cultural duties. These include mudik, visiting families in distant villages, journeys that are already constipating the highways.

The painful movements will peak during the Idul Fitri holiday at the end of July. Though scheduled for just two days the celebrations can extend to two weeks as workers overstay with relatives.

In this environment it’s hard for even the most intense supporter to muster enough enthusiasm for a good demo.  This is despite ample evidence that there’s reason to worry, as foreign commentators have noted.

Ed Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner from the Australian National University have been in Indonesia monitoring the election and writing scathingly about Prabowo.  Example:

“During the election campaign, Prabowo Subianto posed as a democrat. In fact, he protested regularly against being portrayed as a ‘dictator’—even in his last Facebook message to supporters before the election, he complained about the non-democratic image given to him by unspecified forces.

“Now, however, he delivers the final piece of evidence that he truly is a would-be autocrat who has no respect for the will of the people and would stop at nothing to win power, even if he has to lie and cheat his way to the presidency.”

According to the academics that evidence of Prabowo planning to “steal the presidential result” includes supporters bribing electoral officials, sowing confusion and stirring the possum with fake survey results.

There are widespread claims of malpractice, including attempts at vote buying and intimidation of electors.  In some booths not one vote was recorded for Jokowi in what are supposed to be secret ballots. In others officials reportedly defaced votes for Jokowi making them ineligible.

The police, who are supposed to be guarding the process, are notoriously corrupt.  So are many bureaucrats; after the general election in April around 100 electoral staff were sacked for illegal practices.

Jokowi was a late entrant into the presidential race. In local government he became famous for his Javanese consensus-style problem solving. He was handpicked by Megawati Soekarnoputri, the head of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) when it became clear the daughter of first president Soekarno would lose if she stood as planned.

The campaign, run by her daughter Puan Maharani, was reported to be underfunded and clumsy, kept in play only through the smartness of volunteers. It was little contest for the professional show staged by Prabowo’s battalions.  They were backed by his Croesus-rich brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo and the major commercial television stations, the source of most information for Indonesians.

Next came the dishing of dirt that found acceptance in an electorate that prefers gossip to researched and verifiable news. Jokowi was labelled a communist, a Chinese and a secret Christian with an agenda to convert the nation.

He was slow to respond, preferring to stay out of a gutter fight.  Morally-right, politically wrong. Three days before the election he flew to Mecca to pray for success – and prove his Islamic credentials.

There are daily demands from supporters for their opponents to concede defeat, and occasional pleas for the current president and former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to intervene. 

This won’t happen – the General Elections Commission (KPU) has to make the call; Yudhoyono, who has run the nation for the past ten years and is constitutionally barred from continuing in office, has already poisoned his impartiality.  His Democratic Party backed Prabowo.

Indonesia’s seventh president will be sworn in for what should be a five year term on 20 October.  The weeks till then will be a time of living dangerously.  So could the months beyond.

(First published in On Line Opinion, 21 July 2014: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=16514 )

##

  

THE ART OF POTEHI

In praise of puppets        

                                         

It’s easy to spot the besotted.  They lavish their progeny with praise. They dress them in the finest clothes and want to show them off, desperate to garner praise. It’s all about one-eyed love.

This is true of parents and puppeteers; apart from the means of reproduction there seems to be little difference. It’s a point proved by the work of Ardian Purwoseputro, the author and principal photographer of a splendidly illustrated text on the subject - Wayang Potehi of Java.   

 More scholarly research on the glove puppets of Java may eventuate. This year the author won a Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectual collaborative grant for further study.

Whatever follows, this book will be the primary source so all credit to the pioneer.  As Purwoseputro discovered, there’s been a dearth of information in Indonesia; the best source to date has been in Taiwan. 

The author describes himself as an independent researcher and film maker.  His interest in a little-known art started with “childhood dissatisfaction … which suddenly resurfaced when I watched a Potehi puppet show in early 2012.”

The location was a luxury Surabaya hotel, not the back streets of Blitar where the young author-to-be loved the snacks and other treats that accompanied performances.  His mother gave him a Potehi doll, but it was a cheap puppet, a little devil, not up to the standards of those bought by his friends’ richer parents.

Nonetheless it excited his imagination and the spark remained.

Future PhD students will have to be content with analysing the symbols because Purwoseputro has almost sucked the topic dry of facts, adding a fine glossary, biography and a four-page list of Potehi characters. 

Wayang Potehi (also known as wayang thithi in East Java where the art remains strongest) is believed to have come from Southern China, particularly Fujian Province. There’s a quaint myth to explain its origins:  Four prisoners condemned to death tried to lift their depression by performing with improvised hand puppets, using a jangle of pots and pans to make music.

They created such a racket that warders investigated.  They were astonished by the men’s spirit so took them to the king who, of course, offered pardons with conditions: They had to spread the art and make it popular. Variations of this story also appear in other cultures.

Fujian is the homeland of the ancestors of the Peranakan Chinese of Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula, according to Professor Leo Suryadinata.

In his foreword the former director of Chinese heritage at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University writes that Chinese law prohibited the migration of women so the men who went overseas married locally.  Their descendants (including the author) became the Peranakan, a distinct ethnic group with its own foods and lively hybrid culture.

Potehi based on classical Chinese stories entered Indonesia with the migrants.  It spread through parts of the archipelago getting indigenised along the way. The earliest record comes from Batavia (now Jakarta) in the 17^th century.

Around the same time another finger-puppet show was appearing in Britain. Punch and Judy originated in Italian culture and was popular entertainment till recently.  Critics have condemned the violence in the stories as incompatible with modern values.

In 1967 the Orde Baru (New Order) government introduced Presidential Instruction 14 banning all expressions of Chinese language and culture. This was not because the Potehi dolls were politically incorrect by whacking each other with cudgels as in Europe, but because the Chinese were equated with communism.  To the paranoid it mattered not that Potehi predated Mao Tse-tung by several centuries. Even the lotus flower, a symbol of eternity, was banned.

This wasn’t the first time authorities had interfered in the common people’s fun.  In the 1750s the colonial Dutch started taxing performances because the shows were often associated with gambling.

Fortunately folk art rooted in the community is not so easily eradicated by authoritarianism. Potehi didn’t perish; it hibernated.

Potehi were previously seen only in   temple courtyards, locations where they still perform. (The book includes details.)  But once Soeharto had quit the stage the puppets came out of their boxes and into shopping malls and hotels, inspiring Purwoseputro to discover more. The audiences and the dalang (puppet masters) were no longer exclusively Chinese; performances had evolved and ownership had now become shared with the Javanese.

The three-dimensional puppets are still being made and exhibited. Purwoseputro set about finding collections and sometimes the artists (who he calls “sculptors”), getting their stories and photographing their creations.  He also found puppets brought from China early last century that stayed hidden from the culture cops.

Inevitably there are demons and royalty, wise men and knockabout comics, fantasy figures all. The stories contain “heroism, romance and tragedy, strategies and intrigues, loyalty and betrayal, as well as humor.”  Each story title is selected after a ritual asking permission from the temple deities.

Performances are accompanied by a small orchestra that includes string, wind and percussion instruments.  The box stages are also splendid works of art.

This is an easy book to view, though sadly not to read.  The text is tiny and sometimes set against absorbing colors, a serious design error.  Try reading blue on white or vice versa and stay sane.

Described by publisher Afterhours Books as ‘a premium coffee-table book’, it retails a shade under a million rupiah (US $84).

Indonesians may blanch at the cost, but it’s a fraction of prices charged for books in Europe, so good value.

For example, art historian Lydia Kieven’s inadequately-illustrated Following the Cap Figure in Majapahit Temple Reliefs (reviewed 19 August 2013), is half the size and almost entirely monochrome.  It was originally listed at US $142 (Rp 1.7 million).

(First published in The Jakarta Post 14 July 2014)