This piece is the second part of a trilogy essay. It always has something to do with screens. The new capital had one for almost two years now, a command center with glossy LED displays and ambient light, as if national dignity could be coded into color temperature. Bandung had
This piece is the first part of a trilogy essay. I was doing my morning commute a few days ago when I saw a beggar in Jakarta holding a cardboard sign with a printed QR code. She sat quietly in front of a corner cafe, waiting in silence with a
It was another sunny Sunday when I found myself at the driving range. I wasn’t there to play, just watching some old friends swinging their secondhand golf clubs, trying to enjoy the vitamin-D-rich part of the day. There’s been a rising number of people from my generation in
How "disruption" hijacked the city, and sold us the same apartment twice. I’m writing this from an Airbnb unit, ironically, hovering somewhere above South Jakarta’s patches of underdeveloped, overvalued lands. Below, the lobby is a revolving door: a couple dragging matching suitcases, a family juggling a
Thoughts
How Jakarta’s building setbacks became the invisible blueprint for urban exclusion, and why the streets feel dead because of it. I used to wonder why some streets in Jakarta felt alive, and others felt dead. Blok M felt like it belonged to the people. It was messy, walkable, intense.
