Author: Seno Gumira Ajidarma
Length: 207 pages
ISBN# 978-979-433-846-9
Penerbit Mizan 2015
Seno Gumira Ajidarma (SGA) has been my favorite author since
I was in junior high school. I enjoyed reading his works that ranged from
literary journalism, magical realism, essays on sociopolitics and urban
lifestyle, to adaptations of classic epochs such as Kitab Omong Kosong
(Ramayana) and Nagabumi. He has been working on the latter, which usually
resulted with super thick books that will keep us occupied for days to weeks.
Tiada Ojek Di Paris is the
collection of his essays on urban lifestyle in Jakarta (not Paris, actually).
Most of the essays were originally published in Djakarta! magazine, a lifestyle
magazine that is usually provided for free at coffee shops in Jakarta, for the
exchange of tons of ads. OOT speaking, the magazine used to be sold. It was
when the magazine had much more interesting articles that we do not usually get
in average lifestyle magazine. Ayu Utami, Nova Riyanti Yusuf, and Wimar Witoelar also used to contribute in the magazine. But the era keeps changing, I
guess. Anyway. SGA’s essay is always the reason why I keep looking forward to
pick up and read Djakarta! at fancy coffee shops in the city. Unfortunately, I
do not hang out in the city every so often since I got a job just 15 minutes
away from my home. I missed so many essays of him, and always looking forward
to this kind of book where he put his essays altogether.
This book contains 44 essays that are mostly 3-4 pages long.
In some essays, he provided some insights behind the urban social phenomena,
analyze them using some theories on sociology; postmodern and cultural studies,
or simply provided some social commentaries. In his other essays, he wrote about
some prominent figures such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer and interpret some
literary works related to Jakarta. He usually refer the people who reside in
Jakarta as Homo jakartensis. I find a lot of his essays about the behavior of
Homo jakartensis interesting, as how writings about urban life often have their
charms for some poeple. However, there are also some essays that require us to
read in cultural studies mind-frame, of which may not really easily “digested”
by some readers. Having not read much about cultural studies for a long time, I
found myself having to read some paragraphs a few times before getting the gist
of them. There are also essays that sound pure grumpy (nyinyir, as how many
Indonesian social media activists would put it), such as the one about how Homo
jakartensis tend to spend their weekends and how we often ask people on where
they came from in terms of area of origin/birthplace. In my opinion, those
phenomena are not only happened in Jakarta.
Anyway, I like how SGA expressed his concern on how Homo
jakartensis are so fixated with morning news and celebrity gossips (which are
often packed in those so-called “infotainment” shows). For many Homo
jakartensis, morning news is one vital part of their dailies. Heck, let alone
morning news, many of them still believe that it is vital to know every
single thing that were portrayed as “important issues” by the mass media. In
the last essay, he also warned us that we should not fully trust the mass
media. Their increasingly commercial framework has sacrificed the readers’
rights to access actual news by magnifying the less-important news that can be
more engaging, while neglecting the actually important news. For example, we
can see that there is an increasing number of news covering the so-called
celebrities’ private life and sensational scenes from social media such as Twitter;
Facebook and Path. What do we gain from from following and paying attention to
those trashy news? Well apparently, reading online news sites such as detik.com
news can raise your prestige as a well-informed one. I find myself relating to
this concern in this front, as I find this phenomena constantly occurring in
my social circle. I also shared his concern with the notion of car ownership as the symbol of success in Indonesia.
There are some citations inserted to credit the source of
theories SGA used for his analysis. Unfortunately, there is no
bibliography/daftar pustaka page that would be useful if we want to look up
further to the sources. SGA most likely had inserted the bibliography at the
end of each corresponding essay on its initial publishing at Djakarta!, but
the published seemed to had cut and overlooked it. Which is quite a shame for Mizan, as the publisher; and
risky for SGA, as an intellectual who should have been familiar with the ethics on quoting and citing. Should this book gets any reprint, I hope Mizan and SGA will
consider to address this error.
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