“Jangan matikan lampu meja kerja saya” - Harry Roesli
It was dark on the stage of TEDxJakarta.
Then suddenly, there are sound of violins coming out of nowhere, followed by a melodious piano notes. Not for long, the stage lights then gradually turned on, spotting the stage. The light revealed the deceptive truth. Hidden at the dark stage before is a performance by two young violinist and one tall, George Clooney-ish looked piano player.
Both violinist are skillful and passionate and the piano player just as immersed. His hands and body seems to be enjoying itself while playing. I enjoyed it too. I have had heard the song before, but I can’t remembered the title or the singer.
But wait, I suddenly struck by the fact that I recognize the piano player. It turns out that the piano player is Gita Wirjawan, Indonesia’s Minister of Trade. A surprise indeed. Soon as the audience realize this, huge applause roared to the air. It was a great opening.
Then the minister took the stage and speak. Actually, I don’t remembered precisely what was he talking about. It was a boring bla-bla-bla “sambutan pejabat”-like speech. One of the memorable moment is when at some point in the middle of his speech, Gita mis-quoted Steve Jobs famous line from the Stanford commencement speech as “Be Hungry, Be Foolish”. Immediately, some Jobs’s fan-boy at the audience apparently outraged. They eagerly shouted the precise quote, “STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH!”. Poor him. He should realize that he is appearing before the geeky audience that spent long, countless hours watching TED and YouTube videos on Internet, including that particular speech. He was trying to become the “inspiring someone”. But instead of inspiring, he looked perspiring. Kind of overdid it.
I remembered one other thing he said. It was something about the demographic of Indonesia. He argues that we are blessed with a huge number of youth, which means huge productivity and domestic consumption. That with help of those demographic prowess, we are the biggest economy in South East Asia by 1 trillion US dollar GDP. It is a generation as the American used to call it, the baby-boomer.
But, Gita prefers not to called it so. Instead, he proposes that we called it the “Jay-Z” generation. Then, he continued exploring names. So, even better (or worse) he then proposed to called it: “Justin Bieber” generation. He continued with even the best (or worst) calling: the “Ayu Ting Ting” generation. ;)
Yup. I agree with you, readers. That’s… what word should I use to describe it? Oh, got it. That’s just: Lame. So, I want to propose one version to call this generation. I’d like to called ourself : “The Thirsty Generation”. Or in Bahasa Indonesia, we called it “Generasi Dahaga”.
Why? One of the reason is the TEDxJakarta phenomenon. It is almost like a hajj for Muslims.
I remember last month when I was chatting with my mother. She told me that she and my father have registered to have a hajj to Mecca. This is their first time. Even so, they can not traveled immediately this year yet.
Apparently, there is a long waiting list of people wants to go hajj. They are registered to travel on 2016. The long waiting list phenomenon arise because of the huge, consistent demand combined with a limited quota from the Saudi government. As for almost all Muslim, the hajj is the holy pilgrimage that they have long awaited to do. It is considered as one of the pillars of Islam and Muslims are entitled to do it at least once in their lifetime, if they are eligible.
It is a holy spiritual journey. But often, it is also considered as a symbol of social status. The “Pak/Bu Haji” title before their names can boost their position and credibility on society. People dreamed about it. A lot of their child considered funding their parents to go hajj is a great achievement. To achieve this, Muslim family often must routinely save some amount of their salary for a long lifetime for that journey to Mecca.
TEDxJakarta is like a holy pilgrimage to the center of intellectual and passion of Jakarta and, to some extent, Indonesia. Because it is free (as in gratis), the entry barrier is low. Interest is growing consistently, while the tickets-quota is limited. People flocks in to reserve a ticket and vehemently made the available seats sold out just in two minutes!!
At some point, I had thought maybe this is just some marketing gimmick from the organizing committee to try convince the sponsors. But, as I talked to some other attendant on the D-Day, I find them talked about the quick shortage of tickets. They talked how lucky they are to have the tickets, while many others just plainly disappointed, or if they’re persistent, have their name’s put on waiting list and hoping other’s canceled out so he/she can join in.
This youth generation is greedy. They always don’t have enough. Desperately craving to drink from the fountain of inspiration. They are looking for their heroes from their community around them. Which they don’t see it from the never ended political debates and corrupted leader in their TVs.
That, and combined with their exposure to vast number of information in the Internet has awaken the curious lion inside them. Those growing curiosity leads to high expectations of the talk. People expect the talks to be entertaining funny, inspirationally great, jaw-breaking courageous, or brilliantly ingenious.
Moreover, the event poster is intriguing and mysterious with it’s “Deceptive Truth” tag line and dark-themed colors. Actually, the curators did well to fulfill those hopes. They are brave enough to bring the controversial and intriguing issues on stage. But the speaker delivery itself can be categorized as three kind: the boring ones, the brave ones, and the stand-out ones.
The boring ones are a sleeping physician who argue that sleeping kills people (ya ya ya, we know it, nothing new there) and a middle-age woman who tries to convince us that science is sexy. Both are PhD holder, obviously an expert in their field. The subjects they talked about is actually fascinating. But their delivery is somewhat unconvincing, with some awkward moments.
The brave ones are two speakers. First is Firliana Purwanti. She told stories from her research, The O Project, which tried to know the woman experience on orgasm. She don’t hesitate in talking about orgasm, including telling the audience how it feels. Something that turn the audience in a silence gasps. I have a mixed feeling about her talk. In general, I agree that orgasm is a right for adult man and woman. But, I don’t share the same agreement on some issues in human sexuality. Call me conservative, but she tends to place sex and orgasm as the biggest key factor to true happiness. She sounded like a wounded tigress. She shouldn’t feel that way. Because many times in history woman is the behind-the-scene power and reason on why men fought, kings fallen, and kingdoms doomed.
Another brave speaker is F Widayanto. He’s a renowned ceramic artist. His artworks are beautiful. On stage, he told the audience story about how he ends up making ceramic arts. How he struggled with his family and school. How he struggled with the fact that he is a color-blind. How much love he had on elephant. How he finally finds his true calling and passion when he entering the art college which introduced him to ceramics. It’s a great story and he ended it with some quirky pose that brought happy smile and applause from the audience.
But, the stand-out performance award should be given to 57kustik, Connie Bakrie and Noor Huda Ismail. 57Kustik is a group of youngster, mentored by Yaya Roesli and his foundation fellow in Bandung. The group came from various background. Some even homeless and experienced in sleeping on garbage truck load. But they are amazingly creative. When they starts, one of them use a pair of mug to exchange water by pouring one way and around to creates a poured-coffee sound effect. While another guy using an ordinary plastic bag to recreates a bird tweets sound effect. It was almost as we are being brought to the middle of a village somewhere to enjoy a blissful tranquil morning. Then it was followed by the talented performance of violins and guitars alongside a band of energetic, fully charged percussion playing a render of Mario Bros theme song. It was simply electrifying.
Next, imagine a tall, beautiful woman. But add it with talks about military, defense, war, and geopolitics coming from a confident, men-like bass voice. That is Connie Bakrie. Sexy, yet somehow “scary”. She is a researcher focused on security and military. She often gives courses to military personnel, mostly men. Her talks is blatantly straight to the point, yet sometime funny.
She pragmatically talks to us about the importance of guarding our nation and our resources. She revealed that our defense budget is so tiny compared to the requirements we need to guard this vast country. For example, on the shortage of jet-fighter planes, she illustrated that Sukhoi jet-fighter based at Makassar needs approximately 98 minutes to intercept an incident in Papua areas. In that long arrival time, the threat might have been runaway freely. Same situation happens in the naval areas. A lot of foreign countries big fish ships are stealing a huge amount of Indonesian fishes. While Indonesian authority still fighting over who is in charge of the law enforcement there.
While Connie approach against threat is very military oriented, Noor Huda Ismail is a humanitarian one. He is an alumnus of Pondok Pesantren Al-Mukmin Ngruki, where Abu Bakar Baasyir once teached there. While he was studying there, he had a roommate and best friend named Fadlullah. It was a surprise to him when he learned in 2002, his long-time-no-see roommate turns out alleged to be involved in bomb terrorism in Bali. His heart crushed and confused. How can the nice man who memorize all the Quran can do such thing? The question lead him as a journalist at The Washington Post to investigate the story. Including a reunited interview with his friend. He then writes the story of their friendship on a book entitled “Temanku, Teroris?” (or “My Friend, a Terrorist?”).
According to his investigation and research, he argues that no one was born a terrorist. People have to come from a long journey and experience to become one. Instead of a coercive only approach to deal with terrorism, he propose an effort of deradicalization by approaching them as a human being and not a victimized being.
It was a courageous and inspiring talk. He told the stories nicely, adding jokes here and there. On his life journey from Pesantren at Solo to St Andrews at Britain, he told us in smile, “I might be once a roommate of a terrorist, but I am also a school mate of Prince Williams and crushed on Kate Middleton too.”
In conclusion, I thought the TEDxJakarta curators, committees, and volunteers did another good job.
Of course, there are always room to improve. Compared to last year conference, this one is too serious and need a lot of thinking. Because of the theme, I was expecting the event will present some magic performance, or tricks/pranks are applied on the audience in accordance to the April Fool’s day. The speakers presentation should be fixed. Nothing sets off interest more than a dull stage performance. If there is a slideshow, please have a quality control on it. There are always a technical mishaps on stage, while it can be avoided. I do think the TEDx platform is not enough anymore to cope with the ever growing interest of this thirsty generation. We should start inventing a different platform unique to Indonesia. A global-thinked with some local touch.
TEDxJakarta audience is a culturally well-informed tech-savvy people, so they are expecting surprises, and unknown, jaw-breaking, bizarre facts revealed to them. It is a big shoes to fill.
But, as with the quote from Harry Roesli mentioned on top of this article: “Don’t ever turn off the lights on my work desk”, I really hope they are not satisfied yet and keep improving the conference quality. Because, if truth sometimes deceptive, so is success.