Walking the Dog

As of Friday night, I've begun to embrace that quintessential suburban activity of walking the dog. However, it's sort of different here. To begin with there aren't many dogs about and so far I've not seen any dogs or anybody walking a dog. Man's best friend does not enjoy high status in this predominantly Muslim country.

The reason is that the poor animal gets a bad press in the Qu'ran (or Koran as it's written outside the country) due to a certain incident. I've forgotten the details but Desy knows (she told me the story originally) and I'll get her to recount it to me again. Probably because of that story, the saliva of the dog is considered haram (forbidden under Islam) and most Moslems are vigilant in avoiding getting licked by an overly friendly pooch.

Gromit, as our dog is known, had previously never ventured outside the house and so a whole new world has opened up before her, filled with myriad smells and strange animals. So far we've encountered startled cats, furtive rats and elusive toads. It's also an experience for me because, even though I've been in Jakarta for many years, I've rarely walked its streets.

Before I bought a car, I always felt a bit conspicuous walking about the neighbourhood on my own. Desy has never been keen to walk ever (most Indonesians see it as a pointless activity) and so I've seldom ventured out on foot into the suburban night (walking in the day is not an option). Now I have the perfect excuse. I'm just a man walking his dog. I can loiter at my whim or allow myself to be pulled along by the beast at the end of the leash.

I'm sure that I'll have more to report about my evening adventures as I travel further afield and venture down previously untrodden byways. Actually tonight, I was walking past the local mosque at prayer time and, as it often does, my mind fell to considering worse case scenarios.
There was no fence around it, only fifty metres or so of open space. What if Gromit suddenly broke free of her leash and dashed off into the mosque, scattering the faithful as she scurried about? She'd be surely killed and then the outraged congregation would turn on the dog's owner.

Fortunately it didn't happen and I've lived to post another day. Perhaps my post today is of the sort that Andrew Keen had in mind when he wrote his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. I came across a great article today in the Guardian commenting on his book.


The article begins:

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

Far from his birthplace in Golders Green, north London, Keen is now being labelled the nemesis of the new worldwide web. The author and entrepreneur has stunned his adopted country with a book that accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into 'digital narcissism'.


I don't know if I've destroyed much culture or ruined any livelihoods but, well yes, I guess I am a bit of a digital narcissist but I can always argue that I'm doing it to retain credibility as an ageing teacher of Information Technology. How will my students take me seriously if I don't blog, or belong to a social network, or upload videos to YouTube?

YouTube

I've been downloading from YouTube a lot recently, getting videos for the Web 2.0 topic that I'm currently doing with my ITGS (Information Technology in a Global Society) class. I've only uploaded one video and that was just as a trial. It's been sitting on YouTube since March and I remembered that you can embed videos from that site into a blog. I'd seen it done many times but never thought to try it myself but as part of a determined plan to extend my technological skills, I'm embedding that video into this post. It's only 22 seconds in duration if you plan to watch it and is decidedly domestic but if it succeeds then I'll try to upload something more interesting to YouTube later and embed it in a later post.

Here goes:

Sharia Law

On television over the weekend, I just chanced upon footage of another caning of some unlucky couple in Aceh. They had obviously been apprehended for some offence, maybe furtively holding hands or worse. The two of them looked suitably humiliated but what caught my eye were the spectators with camera phones and digital cameras struggling to capture the scene. That made an ugly scene even uglier and reminded me how far religions can stray from the original intentions of their founders.

I only recently finished reading Karen Armstrong's book, "A History of God", in which she reviews the development of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For the most part, history shows Islam to have been remarkably tolerant and accommodating of other religions. From the outset, the Prophet always accepted the validity of the other two Abrahamic religions. Jews and Moslems have generally gotten along well together. The fall of Moslem Spain to Christianity marked a terrible time for the Jews.

Aceh is commonly described as the doorstep of Mecca but it's becoming more and more like the doorstep to hell. Allowing that province to implement sharia law has encouraged its creeping, incremental implementation throughout the rest of Indonesia. In Padang, proficiency in reading the Qu'ran is now a prerequisite for entry into the civil service. Here in Tangerang, on the outskirts of Jakarta, women coming home from work late at night have been apprehended on suspicion of prostitution. One Irian Jaya province however, has struck back and banned women from wearing jilbabs in public.

Obviously the creeping Islamisation of Indonesia has the potential to tear the country apart which is why the principles of Pancasila needs to be revived more enthusiastically. Meanwhile, footage of the canings in Aceh are doubtless finding their way to video sharing sites like www.youtube.com and adding to the nails already in the coffin of the Indonesian tourism industry. Many Indonesians are longing for the good old days under Suharto when corruption was at least highly centralised, it was safe to venture out onto the streets at any time of the day or night, people had enough rice to eat and the Islamic fundamentalists kept a low profile. Of course, that's just nostalgia and a return to the fantasy of a father figure that will save the country.

This fondness for father figure projection extends to the concept of God. The current view of God amongst rank-and-file Moslems is that of very anthropomorphic "old man in the sky" who is watching and judging their actions. However, in "The History of God", Karen Armstrong points out that this is only a recent development within Islam and that for the majority of its history, the religion has placed far more importance on inner experience and a subjective relationship with God. Meanwhile, lock up your daughters or the Sharia police will.

I recommand you read this

I was downloading some software today and received a prompt containing the word "recommanded" in regard to a particular course of action. I don't know if it was simply a spelling mistake or a deliberate attempt at humour by combining the words "recommended" and "commanded" into a single composite word. Whatever the reason, I've now adopted the word and its variants (recommand, recommandation etc.) and will use them on appropriate occasions. For example, if a student's concentration has lapsed ten minutes into one of my frequent pedagogical monologues, I can reclaim attention with the warning "I recommand that you listen to what I'm saying".

My posts are likely to be more frequent now because I've discovered that within Microsoft's Word and OneNote, I can simply type something and then choose "blog this". You can send what you've written to the blog of your choice (selecting from a drop-down menu) and it's posted. Simple as that. Attaching photos is a little more complicated but that will be my next step. Of course, you can edit what you've uploaded later if you need to.

YOTYEB

As the old TMBG (They Might Be Giants) song says:

You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older,
And now you're even older, and now you're even older,
You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older,
And now you're older still.

I can't think of a better way to put it. My 58th birthday was celebrated quietly at the in-house bar that can now boast of being open 24 hours thanks to the flashing sign that Desy bought me as a present. As I often do on such occasions, I paid homage to the great god Bacchus by indulging in a bottle of white wine. So it goes.