Arok of Java: A Mat Salo Book Review

Arok of Java: A Book Review

Ananta Pramoedya Toer (Translated by Max Lane)

ISBN: 978-981-05-8045-2

I ADMIT OF MY IGNORANCE. Before coming to Indonesia I had only barely heard of Ananta Pramoedya Toer. He has since left us but his legacy lives on in his many books.

It was not only my loss but hundreds of millions Indonesians too since his works were banned during Suharto’s era, thus consigning his works to obscurity. Ananta had apparently written many more but most of his material were reportedly confiscated and burned.

His famed Buru Tetralogy (This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Glass –all available in Penguin Books) and Arok of Java (originally titled Arok and Dedes) was “written” during his incarceration on Buru Island between 1965 and 1980. Suharto had stationeries banned for his special prisoner and Ananta was forced to “write” the book in his head, telling and refining the story to fellow inmates. It was only after his release that he was finally able to pen his voluminous tome. His masterpieces impressed the Nobel committee enough to consider him a nominee.

To keep things in perspective, Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind) was the first of Buru Tetralogy, and should be read first. Max Lane, the translator for the book was again responsible for Arok of Java, which was only recently completed and published for the first time.

Lane’s earlier translation of Bumi brought instant fame to Ananta. Lane was then a diplomat, an Australian attaché in Jakarta of the early Eighties. Due to the recognition of Ananta’s works, Lane had inadvertently invited the wrath of the Indonesian government. Lane was expelled from Indonesia becoming a persona non-grata right until Suharto's fall. Bumi was subsequently forced off the shelves, becoming one of the great tragedies of modern literature.

Set in the 13^th century Arok of Java is a novel of “early Indonesia” where Hindu Gods and Goddesses reigned. This was before Islam descended on the archipelago and told of our hero Arok of the Sudra caste, who through scholarship became a Ksatria and finally a Brahmin. Many have likened Arok to Robin Hood but it is only a superficial connection. In that era, descendants of great King Erlangga sat in Kediri and the outlying areas were controlled by appointed ‘Governors’ who had to pay tribute to the King.

The Governor of Tumapel, a vile villainous character was installed and brought back slavery that was earlier abolished by Erlangga. The Governor was of the Sudra caste who worshipped Lord Vishnu. The Brahmins, who are worshippers of Lord Siva, had lost all their influence and were confined to their temples. The subtext was the past two centuries, the Brahmins had become outcasts and no longer relevant. The precocious Arok who mastered Sanskrit at an early age grew to become a warrior; a scholar-bandit and rebel –his destiny to bring the Brahmins back to glory.

Arok had then started a campaign of resistance. He robbed the tribute coaches en route to Kediri amassing the wealth to free the peoples of slavery and suppression. The Governor was perplexed as to the hit and run losses; bringing displeasure to the King. The King was angry at the formers inability to bring order; especially when the Kingdom’s treasury was compromised.

The final straw was when the Governor, a lowly-Sudra himself who by chicanery and deceit became all-powerful, kidnapped the beautiful Dedes, a Brahmani, to make her his consort. His obsession with Dedes was his final undoing and provided the stage for Arok’s entrance.

A blurb from the book’s jacket reads: “As the rebellion spreads, it is Arok himself whom the rulers employ to suppress it . . . Thus emerges one of the epic political conspiracies of Javanese history.”

Arok is an epic saga much in the great traditions of Ramayana and Mahabharata. My only problem was in the book’s editing. There were some errors in spelling that distracted the reader. By contrast, The Buru Tetralogy, published by Penguin, was exquisitely edited. This is but a minor speck in this vast canvas of Anata’s beautiful narration.

A must read; but only after your appetite had been appropriately whetted by the brilliant This Earth of Mankind.

384 pages, excluding Introductions, Acknowledgments and Glossaries.

First published in 2007.

Edited by: Tan Chee Leng

Illustrations by: Mohamad Yusof

Horizon Books, Singapore. www.horizonbooks.com.sg

The Game of Tag

Captain Jafflam had tagged me and my response is long overdue. This one is about three personal episodes and lessons learned from 2007. Here they are in no order of importance:

1. Try to be a good sport when it comes to tagging. Resolution: Try to be a good sport by obliging.
2. Was a dumb-ass asshole for the period ending 31 December, 2007 and the years prior. Resolution: Try to be a lesser asshole and be forgiving of my failings, of which I have tons.
3. Wasn't a central character in Mat Salo's movie called Being There. Resolution: Hope to be around more often. Or at least make the effort.
4. Ha, got plenty I tell ya. The last one is to emulate all my favorite bloggers out there. You only have to look at my Blogroll to see who. I'll start by doing an Elviza. Look out for a book review in my next post folks!
   

Bad things come in threes . . .

A pall has descended over Yani.

Yani is the rig I work on and is owned by Ariffin Pinogoro, who appears as # 9 on the latest Forbes list of “40 Richest Indonesians” with a net worth close to 1 Billion gawd-almighty US dollars. This time around, even Liem Soei Liong of the Salim Group had to contend with 10^th place.

The offshore rigs are named after his sons and daughters. Yani’s other “siblings” include Raissa, Raissis, Maera, Raniworo and with the latest one, a super-premium jack-up called Soehannah –sons and daughters of a true blue US dollar billionaire.

Anyway this isn’t the point of the story. My previous post told of an accident that happened on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas. At that point the denizens of Yani were still optimistic of the New Year’s rig party. Apparently, a down payment of a million rupiahs was already handed to the ‘electone singing group’. I was mistaken. There were to be four women, not just one; an organ player with the other three singing / dancing and were originally scheduled to be smuggled in on New Years Eve.

Sorry to disappoint you but there was no new New Year’s Party. In fact, I slept through twelve midnight while revelers in Malaysia were gathered watching taxpayers money dissipate via fireworks. The party was canceled on the morning of the December 31^st, and this time everybody was in unanimous agreement.

At 3.OO a.m. on that fateful morning (I was asleep and oblivious to the violence that unfolded) an altercation broke out with a roustabout and his leader, whom we call “headman” (mandor in boleh-speak). The roustabout did the unthinkable: he pulled a knife and chased the poor headman before being restrained by fellow roustabouts. The Major (rig liason officer) had to be called in and within fifteen minutes the marine police had come aboard brandishing side-arms and machine guns.

Pak D---, the perp, was the quiet sort. Even after two years being on the Yani we hardly exchanged words. But he was always glad to accept my occasional gifts of Sampoerna Mild kretek cigarettes though. But I never thought him as someone dangerous. Another myth broken; goes to show Mat Salo’s not such a good judge of character after all. . .

Anyway that violent interlude was the final nail in the coffin and put paid to our New Year’s bash for good. Bosses from town had to descend by slow-boat (choppers weren’t running on the 31^st) to do their damage control. With the police and management folks swarming around you can forget about the party. They’re pissed-off already since this has spoiled their New Year’s holiday…

But again this isn’t the point of the story. The point is our colleague Agus Untung was called to the lord, at 3.00 a.m. this morning in the bosom of his family. He was on his days off. He was 38 years old, married with two children, and with no known ailments. He doesn’t even drink coffee or smoke.

Tomorrow, Saturday the 5^th, would have been his crew change day when we were supposed to trade banter again.

But it was not to be, Pak Agus yah?

So now you know why there’s a pall hanging over Yani like a leaden cloud…

Agus Untung 1969 - 2008

© Matsalo Images 2007 - Photo taken in September 2007.

Berita Duka Cita

INNA LILAIHI WAINA ILAHI ROJI'UN

TELAH BERPULANG KE RAHMATULLAH REKAN KERJA TERCINTA BPK. AGUS UNTUNG - ROUSTABOUT CREW-C RIG YANI.

HARI INI PADA TGL, 04 JANUARI JAM 03:00 W.I.T.

DI DAERAH GUNUNG MALANG, BALIKPAPAN

SEMOGA ARWAHNYA DITERIMA ALLAH S.W.T.

DAN SEMOGA KELUARGA YANG DITINGGALKAN DIBERIKAN KEKUATAN & DITABAHKAN INMANNYA.

KAMI KELUARGA BESAR YANI - RIG IKUT BERDUKA CITA YANG MENDALAM,

TTD,

KELUARGA BESAR YANI RIG YANI - 104.

Post-Christmas Funk 2007

FUNK. IT MEANS "cowering with fear" or a "state of fright", or a feeling of dejection. Yes, that's right and I'm feeling dejected right now. No, I know it's the end of the year when we have a big Christmas party on the rig and everybody gets funky. That's not the funk I meant.

Please look at the sign above. I photographed it this morning just after some numbers in there had "changed". For you non-marine or offshore types out there (which is 99.9999 percent of the world's population anyway) the term LTA means hell of a lot. It stands for "lost time accident" and yes, as of today it is only Day 2. Two days ago the number atood at 1658 --meaning FOUR-AND-A-HALF YEARS since the rig had an accident.

Actually that's not true at all because the rig NEVER had an accident until the day before. Why? Because the rig is so new that there hasn't been an accident since it arrived here four-and-a-half years ago spanking brand new from Keppel-FELS shipyard in Singapore.

The day after Christmas I had just started to spud in a new well. It was five in the morning. This particular well had a rather peculiar charachteristic in that it spewed out lots excessive gumbo which required the crew to clean the lower decks often. Fire hoses were employed and one particular guy did not hold the nozzle of the fire hose steady. When the fire pumps kicked in the hose snaked and caused him to lose control . . . the net result being the nozzle firing the high pressure water with mud and debris . . . into his eye. We're not sure how he's doing yet because he was whisked to the medic's room and a chopper evacuated him two hours later. Our resident Liason Officer, a Major with the TNI Navy had to escort him on the chopper and to the hospital since both eyes were heavily bandaged.

He was operated yesterday and the word was his intra-occular functions remained intact. Probably to remove a blood clot or something.

The reason it's such a big deal because safety is a very serious issue with the oil companies and contractors. The safety record is tied into the contract and for the whole of 2008 the rest of the crew will have to pay the price of not getting any "safety bonuses". It's quite a bit and can amount to 10 - 20 percent of their annual income. I even had a cheap Motorola phone and a toolbox to take home last year. All because of a good safety track record.

Then there is the loss of prestige and reputation. Not to mention nosy investigators that will come in in the next few days to lecture us.

But I have a more serious concern. For the upcoming New Year's Party the client had earlier on insisted I "contribute". By this he meant illicit liquor. In previous blogs I mentioned that alcoholic drinks is strictly prohibited from any offshore installations. But this is a French company and they all like their tipple now and again. We'll, not just the French . . .

So I complied by smuggling a bottle of Pernod and Dewars' White Label past the boat security people. I was actually booked on the chopper but no way I can get whisky past aviation security. So I had to detour and take the long way by speedboat where the marine port people are a little more "friendly".

Then another asshole (someone like me) found an "electone singer". In Indonesia it usually meant lady pub singers that know how to work an organ and has a half-way decent voice but a more-than-decent body. She is scheduled to be smuggled to the rig on New Year's Eve.

A girl at the ready. Intoxicating liquids at the ready. Mat Salo's organ --er, camera --at the ready. With investigators coming and possibly doing a little spot-checking. Not too worry, it's well hidden along with other contraband that other service contractors had contributed. There's crates and crates of Anker Bir too . . .

Just let's hope the investigators and safety officers come after the holiday season is over.

Which reminds me . . . Folks, have a Happy New Year and may 2008 be good to you.

© 2007 MatSalo Images

Friends in High Places

INSTEAD OF FEELING the need for speed, like my hyper six-year-old often does (he has actually completed PS2's Need For Speed:Carbon, no kidding), I too feel the need . . . to trumpet a few things.

Mat Salo indeed has friends (not too many) and foes (plenty - just check out the politicians) in high places and this is a good time as any to give them their due. I'm not even going to bother checking with them if this is a good idea, because hey - that's what friends are for, right?

Today on perusing TheStar's Biz Section (Maybank Appoints New CFO) I was pleasantly surprised to read that a batchmate of mine, Beghat (nickname on account of his rather stupenduos male-centric accessory), was appointed the second-most powerful position in Maybank. No shit, Sherlock.

So I sent him an sms which goes like this: Hey Beghat.. Congrats & I hope I'm not the last to wish you. Woi! Now can u pls get your housing loan ppl to get off my back?

Comes in handy to have a buddy up there, I guess.

But the good Lato' Haji had the cheek to reply: thanks bro', but when you sold me those fotos back in kolek how come you never give me discount? And for the final nail in the coffin, signed off with a heh-heh.

An explanation is in order. I have been into photography ever since I was in Form One and it fell on me to catalog a piece of my batch's history and also to profit from it. So I'm the nerd with camera slung around the neck and was charging 20 sens (1975 dollars) for a 3R copy. And that was just for the black and white ones! I developed and printed them myself at the club's darkroom below the stairs near the science lab. The camera, all manual shit with no auto-anything was of course the club's property, along with the developer fluid, enlarger and photographic paper. For color prints I have it sent across to Yong's Photo down on Kuala Kangsar's main street where I would apply the appropriate mark-up to my fellow victims. At the end of the day, that was what the good Dato' remembered.

The bloody profiteering.

And the bloody profiteering is why The Bank has posted record profits --- and why its employees are now busily picketing with round badges over their breasts crying, "Thief!"

Anyway here's a photo of MBB's Number Two as a thirteen year-old preserved for posterity by yours truly.

©Mat Salo 1975

Payback time, eh Lato'? No man, am real proud of you, dude!

Actually I was into photography way longer than that (but why I'm still taking crap photos is anybody's guess). It all started in primary school when I was classmates with Mr. Heng FM whose dad owned the Film Star Photo Studios on Jalan Trus, Johor Bahru. As a ten-year old boy I was impressed that FM had a professional dad who photographed Ministers and Sultans.

Which brings me my next story, FM himself.

Couple of months back FM was also featured in The Star in his capacity as Managing Director of an SME IT company called Ceedtec in Penang, poised on the brink of greatness, MESDAQ and all that.

As per normal trumpet procedure, Mat Salo was the first to have caught this scintillitating item and had forwarded it to my primary school STAR2 JB e-groups where FM was forced to answer some uncomfortable questions.



For many years FM worked in the 'kilang sector' and while with HP had a big hand in putting cameras into phones. But it surprised me to know that FM, being unworthy of his dear father's profession? - shoots only with a compact camera? What-the-f%&*? An Olympus I think. Hard to believe he hasn't got an SLR when Heng Sr. was probably the most respected photographer back in the wild and swingin' JB Seventies.

At press time FM is actively enganging an "ODM Partner" (whatever that means) and having talks with "VC's" (Venture Capiltalists). Anyway, seriously, I do wish him luck. I hope to cash in if his tech company hits the jackpot. And do remember, you read it here first!

And my final story is about a guy, also from way back in JB who has now, some speculate, succumbed to the Dark Side*. Zikri is the guy in blue.

©US Department of Energy - Argonne National Labs

Zikri Yusof, PhD., is an "Accelerator Physicist" at US's prestigious Argonne National Labs near Chicago, Illinois. In our "JB" e-groups, Z, like his illustrious English College schoolmate FM before him, also had to answer lots of uncomfortable questions - namely from nincompoops like me. Z's breakthrough has directly impacted our lives by making more efficent x-ray machines using less energy.

Who knows, this Towering Malaysian might perhaps one day win a Nobel.

If that happens I can then smugly say, hey, I know that dude!

Please read Argonne's Press Release here.

And if you're like me, who never paid much attention to secondary school physics, I asked some rather silly questions because the press release was sheer gobbledygook. So Z was forced to email us a detailed explanation which I shall reproduce below in its entirety.

Since several of you have expressed some curiosity regarding the nature of this work, I will spend a few minutes describing what it is, and how, in fact, the advancement here could actually have an impact on a lot of people, beyond just the immediate application to high energy physics.

The whole idea here is to make a better accelerating structure to accelerate charged particles, in this case, electrons. Our current technology uses copper cavities to do that. However, we can only put so much gradient inside this cavity before we destroy it (roughly 30-60 MV/m). So in order to accelerate particles to higher and higher energies (such as the one about to be turned on at CERN), the accelerator facility needs to be longer and longer so that we can stack more and more of these copper accelerating structures to get to the energy that we want. Unfortunately, this also means that such facility will be horrendously more expensive. The proposed International Linear Collider, which will be about 40 km long, is estimated to be about US$10-15 billion! At some point, we just can no longer build such monsters.

Thus, several groups around the world have been working on new acceleration schemes to make smaller structures able to produce higher accelerating gradients than the conventional ones. Our group, the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator, is one of them.

The physics here is actually quite simple [emphasis mine]. Imagine you have a boat moving on water. What you see behind the boat is a wake left behind that was generated by the boat. The larger and faster the boat, the larger is this water wake.

In our case, the boat is a bunch of electrons, and the "water", which is the medium that the wake is generated in, is a dielectric (insulating ceramic) hollow tube, and the wake field itself is the electric field. We can generate an accelerating mechanism in 2 ways:

1.We pass a large bunch of charge (we call this the drive beam) through our dielectric tube. It creates a large wake field. Then before that wake field decays away, if we pass a small bunch of charge at just the right moment, it will experience an acceleration through the tube. This second bunch is the bunch that you want to accelerate (we call this the witness bunch since it is "witnessing" the wake field). This is like a transformer ratio – large current, low voltage being equal to low current, high voltage, with the power being the same. In our case, it is large charge, low gradient going to low charge, high gradient. The drive bunch has a high charge, creating all the wake field, and this causes a witness beam of low charge to be accelerated by a large gradient.

2.But that’s not the only means of doing this. Since the wake generated is nothing more than a classical wave, we know that classical wave can add constructively. So, if we smart enough, we can make use of that. And we do! If, after the first drive bunch has passed though, if we can add a SECOND drive bunch just at the right time, the wake field generated by the second will ADD to the wake field generated by the first, thus creating an even larger wake! What if we have 4 drive beams, 8 drive beams, 16 drive beams, 32 drive beams… etc.? You can already see that if we can have a "bunch train" of drive beams spaced just right, we can create quite a large wake to accelerate the witness beam.

As you can imagine, the construction and the details in producing all this aren’t trivial. That’s why it took the group almost 20 years just to get to that 100 MV/m milestone. We’re hoping that since we now understand things more (and we also know what dielectric to use), the next series of progress won’t take as long.

Oh, how does this impact you? If everything works, it means that we can produce a cheap, compact accelerator. Accelerators are used in a lot of things, including to generate x-rays. There are medical accelerators to generate x-rays already in used in hospitals and doctors’ offices. In principle, this technique can create more compact, cheaper medical x-rays for not just diagnostics, but treatment as well.

Whoa! I’ve written way too much and have probably put all of you to sleep! Still, I’m sure you can understand by now the excitement surrounding this, and why I think this is quite fascinating.
Take care!
Z.
-----------------------------------

Damn, Z. Whatever. Now people... do you find this fascinating? Especially about the "physics is simple part"?

Anyway, heartiest congratulations to my friends Beghat, FM and Z.

And about the "embellishments" in this blog . . . all this is in jest, eh buddies?

===================

Uh-uh, got another one to make. An addendum. Because as soon as I posted this one up another interesting snippet came up in The Star today. This involves blood, my kah-zen, Man, the 'white sheep' of the family. No need to tell you who the 'baa baa blackie' is, eh?

This last-in-the-minute-past-deadline-post does the title justice - Friends in High Places - literally.

Anyway, Man, or referred to in The Star's story as Mejar Azman Jantan, is the first to fly the 'Ferrari of fighter jets' - the Sukhoi SU-30MKM - training with the famed Russian Knights since last July in Moscow. The reason he appeared in today's Star was because he did some aerobatic display at yesterday's LIMA in Langkawi. The paper quoted him as saying:

"...the Sukhoi could stall in midair while making swift turns, noting that it could also bank 90 degrees in the air and tail-slide down at ease.

“Apart from making flat spins like a falling leaf, the aircraft can also do a fantastic spin role on slow speed, dropping from 270 knots to 50 knots in less than five seconds,” he said.

Mejar Azman said the RMAF was looking for young and talented Malaysians to become pilots.

“Hopefully, by Lima 2009, we could have our own aerobatic team using all 18 Sukhoi aircraft,” he said.

Ea-sy kah-zen... gotta run that one by our current DPM first.

Anyway Man was already making news even from the late 80's when Mat Salo was busy scrubbing the deck of junk 25-year floating rust bucket. He did the family proud and even managed to further cement Mat Salo's reputation as the 'blackie'.

Man who had then just graduated from the Royal Military College (RMC) became the first ever Malaysian to be inducted into the famed Colorado Springs US Air Force Academy. The mother of all Top Gun schools which has produced 34 astronauts, famous Vietnam POW's and a host of US generals. There were Malaysians before him who went into West Point and the Naval Academy in Maryland but USAF? Not yet laar...

The USAF's is not only a military boot camp but a top-notch 4-year engineering undergraduate institution as well. Let's look at what it takes to get into one:

All qualified candidates may apply for nomination by either of their state’s two U.S. senators, their U.S. congressional representative, or the vice president of the United States. Children of armed forces personnel (on active duty or retired) may apply for nomination by the president of the United States. Nominations are also available to qualified enlisted members of the Air Force and Air Force Reserve. Qualified children of Medal of Honor winners . . . [as quoted in MSN's Encarta ]

Ok, Man, proud of you, 'cuz. I look at it this way, without white there can be no black. Without evil there can be no good. So it takes all kinds . . .