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?