ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON in late September, gaggles of hijab-clad women, many with young children in tow, swarmed outside the closed gates of an auditorium in Taman Mini, a popular recreational park in east Jakarta. A brawny, black-maned figure wielding a bow and arrow pouted suggestively from a phalanx of promotional banners that lined the…
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Indonesia: Chasing Komodo dragons
Encrusted in dry savannah, Rinca rose out of the water abruptly, like a gnarled and ancient creature, watching us approaching intruders with unblinking reptilian eyes. That the landscape felt anachronistic was apposite, for so were its inhabitants: dragons.
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Modi and Jokowi: Why the World Should Take Notice
For India and Indonesia, the world’s largest and third-largest democracies, 2014 is a watershed. It is the year that powerful political dynasties, a long-term feature of the region’s electoral landscape, were finally supplanted by a new breed of popular leader.That is why the twin elections — of Narendra Modi in India and of Joko Widodo…
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Forget China, India Should Look to Indonesia
Indians rarely agree on much, but they do tend towards an uncommon consensus about the belief in Indian exceptionalism. Rightists, Leftists and Opportunists find themselves on the same page in espousing the idea that as a country and civilization, India is uniquely diverse, contradictory, large, tolerant, and complex. Having been educated into a strong emotional…
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Indonesia Etc by Elizabeth Pisani
IN THIS “ASIAN CENTURY,” much global intellectual space is devoted to showering China and India, the region’s haute emerging nations, with breathless superlatives that reference their epic demographics and vast geographic spread. There is, however, another nation on the same continent that, despite its size, economic heft, social complexity, and strategic importance, remains what is,…
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Leftover Women by Leta Hong Fincher
I lived in China for seven years between 2002 and 2009. My first impressions of the capital city, Beijing, were a mosaic of images and scents: dazzling sheaths of glass and chrome that reared up into the sky; the whiff of jasmine rising from steaming cups of tea; old men in Mao jackets taking caged…
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