I have seen the future, and it can work

SOME years ago, I went to Jakarta to give a talk at a conference. On the day of my arrival, the organisers thoughtfully organised a welcome dinner.

I was due to arrive in Jakarta around 3pm, and the dinner was scheduled for 7.30pm. That would have fit neatly into my schedule.

Unfortunately, my plane was delayed, and by the time I got into the taxi, we were banged in the middle of rush hour.

Now, Jakarta’s rush hour is, in fact, a ‘standstill hour’. Here, the American term ‘gridlock’ is more appropriate. That was when I learned the meaning of the Indonesian word – ‘machet!’ (note the exclamation mark).

By the time I arrived at the restaurant, it was 9 o’clock. The invited guests were hungry, but too polite to start the dinner first. Well, that’s ‘machet’ for you. Perhaps that is the price of progress.

If Jakarta is notorious (traffic-wise), Manila is its twin brother. Let me recount my experience in Manila.

“You have missed our turning!” I said to our driver.

“Don’t worry,” he replied, and then he did something that made me wish I had not pointed out his mistake in the first place. He calmly executed a U-turn, cutting across a line of cars and the two thick, solid lines that separated us from the traffic travelling from the opposite direction.

I blanched at the audacity of his manoeuvre as we held up traffic on both sides, inching the way to their desired destination. I would have blanched even more had it not been for the fact that the traffic was crawling at a snail’s pace because of the jam – a hallmark of Manila.

Such are the wonders of modern air travel that, just that morning, I was enjoying a leisurely drive to my favourite coffee shop on the way to the airport in Kuching.

By late afternoon, I was in Manila, a city that is psychologically and emotionally thousands of miles away from Kuching. It took a while for that fact to sink in, but being caught in a major gridlock jam confirmed to me that I was no longer in Kuching.

I sat there trying my best to control my stress level (I was late for an appointment) by repeating the mantric word ‘Om’, but that did not quite help.

Looking out of my car window, I could see a sea of people, many cramped into open-side ‘jeepneys’, exposed to the sun and the heat, and breathing the polluted air.

Jeepneys are the most popular means of public transportation in the Philippines. They were originally made from US military jeeps left over from World War II, and are well known for their flamboyant decoration and crowded seating.

I felt a sense of sympathy for these commuters. My sense of sympathy turned to pity when we arrived at the traffic lights. As we waited for the lights to change, our car was swarmed by people, young and old, offering to clean our car window, and hawking chewing gums, cigarettes and snacks.

There were also pregnant women with babies in their arms (yes, pregnant women carrying babies) selling strings of scented flowers. Some of these poor souls did not even pretend to be selling anything; they just stood there outside one’s car with their sad eyes, tugging at our heartstrings, begging for a few centavos.

I have been warned not to give to any, for then one could be really swarmed. The only thing to do was to de-sensitise oneself and pretend that they were not there. I feared for these desperate people as they weaved in and out between cars, doing whatever business they could while keeping an eye on the changing lights. They have to be very nimble on their feet to avoid being engulfed by the traffic when the cars start to move again.

Later that evening, I was dining at La Cocina de Tita Moning (unfortunately, the restaurant has since closed down). This restaurant was in the house of an illustrious family, the Legardas. The Legarda House (1937) was one of the first Art Deco Houses built in Metro Manila. It is located only a few paces from the Presidential Palace of Malacanang.

This neighbourhood was once Manila’s most elegant district. The restaurant manager was prompt to emphasise La Cocina as being more than a restaurant – it’s a ‘dining experience’.

Indeed, she could easily have said that it is more than just a ‘dining experience’. Prior to dinner, we were given a tour of the mansion and saw glimpses of the fine living of a bygone era. It was a peek into the glorious past of this historical city, to its halcyon days when it was aptly named ‘the Pearl of the Orient’.

I read that by the 1950s, Manila was the envy of all Asian cities. It was the top Asian city, combining elegance, excitement, and all the modernity of the day. The Philippine basketball team was featured among the top teams in the 1954 Olympics when most nations in Asia had not even heard of the Games itself.

Yes, then-Manila was the city to be emulated.

However, at dinner, even amid the grandeur of antique china, silverware, elegant table décor, attentive servers, and the aura of a gracious past, my mind kept on drifting back to the images of those poor kids with their doleful eyes staring at me from outside my car, of the traffic jam, and of the choking fumes from the exhaust of cars.

My host, Prof Alfonso, seemed to read my thoughts and said: “Yes, we are a city of a glorious past and uncertain future.”

When I came back, I felt so blessed to live in good old Kuching, with its leisurely pace and old-world charm.

However, that was about 10 years ago. Now, we begin to note that the dreaded ‘machet’ is slowly creeping in. We learn to avoid being on the road between 7.30am and 9.30am in the morning, and 5pm and 6.30pm in the evening.

Then there are also the dreaded hours around mid-day when the school morning session finishes and the afternoon classes are due to start. Between noon and 1.30pm, the roads in the vicinity of schools are transformed into car parks, with cars triple-parked along the roads.

Sitting in one of these mini ‘machet’, my mind drifted to my experience in Jakarta and Manila.

There is a saying: “The future is just a consequence of our present.”

I wonder if Manila and Jakarta are the future of Kuching. Dwelling on this depressing thought, I wrote a piece: “I have seen the future, and it sucks.”

I was on a tour in China earlier in the month and spent five days in Beijing. My experience with the traffic in that great city made me revise my harsh view.

When I first visited Beijing in the late 1980s, the city was swarmed with bicycles; there were very few cars on the road.

It was rather chaotic, and I wondered what the traffic conditions would be as the Chinese became more affluent and could afford cars.

Well, they do manage rather nicely, I must say. For nearly a week, we were motoring around the city in our private van with no bother. And never once did I feel the need to destress myself by chanting ‘om’.

Firstly, the city’s arterial roads are very well-planned, with the main motorised vehicles section flanked by dedicated motorbike (mostly electric-driven) and bicycle routes and, besides that, a wide pedestrian sidewalk.

Secondly, they have a well-disciplined driving culture. In Kuching, we need to watch out for cars and motorbikes, weaving and switching lanes from left and right. In Beijing, errant drivers (and motorcyclists) are ticketed instantly by the traffic police stationed at every intersection.

There was a time when Beijing was billed as ‘a very polluted city’, because of the fumes from car exhausts. Photos of the city in a pall of toxic cloud were circulated liberally. During our long visits to the capital (my daughter was a student there in the early 2000s), we seldom saw the blue sky.

However, this last week, we saw nothing else but blue sky.

So, I would like to retract my earlier pessimistic statement, ‘I have seen the future, and it sucks’, after my dire experience in the two major Asian cities.

Kuching has a population of under one million, and Beijing has 20 million.

So, I want to say: “I have seen the future, and it can work.”