The World Would Never Look the Same

I meant the title, and I meant it literally.

I have been having problem in seeing things for about a month but the Ramadhan is not a comfortable time to go to a hospital.

So I went there last week, the ophthalmologist told me that my minus increase by half and my cylinder increase by one.

That would explain the blur vision. The work load for the last couple of months has been piling indeed.

So I am getting new glasses. My dearest sister would not let me use the back up glasses and insist I look for an up to date design. Well, she is the style expert in the family so who am I to argue her.

Now I have a clearer vision of the world.

Sometime people see what they want to see. Not to look deeper and sincerely find answer but more to confirm their pre existing belief.

Life is how we see things. We could see life as dark and gloomy; merely as place to fulfil what natural/social order told us too. As a site full of danger and messiness.

Or the world could be a place for discovery and adventure. To see the world in full height of its splendour and colour (black n white is good for some setting though).

To seek out the farthest castle and the highest mountain, but not overlook the nearby flower. Where a sense of wonder filled the air and it's allright to fall head over heels.

The magnificent Nat King Cole has his own take on seeing things:

L is for the way you look at me
O is for the only one I see

Angel, the world indeed would never look the same for me after this week.

To quote and to be quoted

To quote is to use something that someone said or write in your own while stating the source. While I have a lot of experience in quoting but very few in being quoted.

Somehow my dear colleague and friend 's wished for me to, "Looking forward to seeing more carving of your names both at the bottom/top of the article and within the article" is fullfilled so soon.

Just hope that my two cents worth of opinion (click here) has some positive impact out there, at least in increasing public knowledge about the issue.

Laskar Pelangi is Titanic at dry land

Nope, I am not saying that Laskar Pelangi The Movie (LP onward) is sinking.

Instead, it rises and soars. The movie uplifts spirit and strengthen character, the characters are believable (well, it is a true story) and played strongly (Mahar is particularly captivating).

The massage on the importance of education as well as dream high and work hard (mimpi adalah kunci) is what Indonesia need at the moment of uncertainty and short cut-ism/corruptism.

If Indonesia lacked recent local heroes, now we got two dozens (one dozen children characters and one dozen adult) to relate to.

From the study hard poor student (Lintang), crossing boundaries (Ikal), creativity (Mahar), muscular (Samson), caring (Sahara), challenged-since-birth (Harun), tolerance (A Kiong), leadership (Kucai), and rich (Flo). And of course the beautyful-but unreachable (A Ling). Trapani and Syahdan is so underplay in LP, but understandable considering wealth of character crowding screen time.

The adult character is not less engaging. The devoted schoolmater (Ikranegara as Pak Harfan, not dead in the book though), devoted and loveable teacher (Cut Mini managed to tone down her beauty as Bu Mus), rich-but-caring-official (Slamet Rahardjo steal the show as Pak Zulkarnaen), competitor-cum-potential-lover (Tora Sudiro as Pak Mahmud), kind-but-defeated-by-circumstances (Pak Bakrie layed by Teuku Rifnu Wikana). Rieke Dyah Pitaloka, Mathias Muchus and Alex Komang played hardworking but hopeful parents of Ikal and Lintang.

One can nitpicked the movie of trying to overdramatize the hardship by making Pak Bakrie leave the school for better pay and killed Pak Harfan (both not in the book) leaving Bu Mus as the sole teacher in the school. Also the way Pak Bakrie said “nggak” instead of “ndak” at his final sentence on how the better offer could not wait. And why A Kiong showed doing shalat while in the book he is not a Moslem. The supposedly two pivotal scene where Ikal first met A Ling and the Massay Dance also feel a bit flat and bland.

But back to my title, a good movie has to be able to be read in many layers. On the top layers, it is a story of the victory hope against hard circumstances, the triumph of hard work and camaraderie against the unfortunate lottery of birth.

But is also have a lot of Titanic like structuralist approach. The narrator spoke about the walls and barb wired that divide, places with sign saying non- PN Timah employee could not enter and the stark contrast between SD PN Timah and SD Muhammadiyah.

I could not help but reminded of the movie Titanic, it had undercurrent of class structure where the third class passengers has more than twice the death rate (check this interesting slide) of the first class. The scene where the lower deck were locked when the first class getting lifeboats to escape is so cold and chilling that I shuddered in the cinema.



In the less dramatic but not less important scene of life, the lifeboat of social mobility is education. It is sad when one of the worthy passengers is not given a seat.

But it’s interesting how the born-rich and daddy’s girl Flo just keep silent and not offering to help when the genius Lintang was forced to leave school after his father’s dead.

Do you know that like the poor Jack Dawson in Titanic, the real Lintang is lost and could not be find after the unfortunate incidents? Some differences are too far apart even for a rainbow to bridge. Dream might be a key, but many doors need more than one key to open.