Unihibited Islands

By Terry Lacey

(May 13, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Jakarta Post had an interesting article recently explaining that the Indonesian Government was considering selling uninhibited islands to people from the Asia Pacific region (and anywhere else) who had lost their homes due to rising sea levels attributable to climate change.

Presumably uninhibited islands have less inhibitions than inhibited islands. Perhaps you can swim starkers on uninhibited islands. Of course it might help if they were uninhabited, which is perhaps what was intended. On a good day in Indonesia things feel rather more uninhibited than lots of other places I could think of.

But we are making rapid economic progress in Indonesia, despite nearly everyone else having the global economic crisis. Indonesia has 4.5 percent growth, reportedly the highest rate of consumer confidence in the world and hugely oversubscribed bond sales for Islamic bonds. So we are getting more inhibited all the time.

For example we doubled the number of registered taxpayers between 2008 and 2009, from about six million to about twelve million, an amazing achievement, resulting in being a lot more inhibited, by filling in forms and paying taxes, like everyone else.

I have the feeling rather like the urge to see Cuba before it changes, that the speed of change in Indonesia is now such that its best to visit while its still a bit uninhibited.

For example to see Jakarta with all its glorious anarchic traffic jams, floods and streets full of hawkers building shops and restaurants out into the street. But soon things will improve as we get the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit), better infrastructure and regulatory enforcement and become more like Singapore. Jakarta is already planning its equivalent of Singapore´s Orchard Avenue, its best shopping street. But most of us don’t want it to be quite as organized as Singapore.

Spending time working on the Jakarta Post copydesk, in the business section, I get to see the changes in the ways we make mistakes in English in newspapers, especially working on an English language newspaper in a country where English is probably the third language down the list, after Bahasa Indonesia, and Chinese.

The influence of the Dutch colonial era on Bahasa Indonesia means not only that lots of words like kantoor (office), apoteek (chemist) and verboten (forbidden) come from the Dutch, but that also sentence construction in Bahasa Indonesia can be distinctly Germanic, with the verb wandering discretely near the very end of the sentence, as you hang on, breathless, waiting to find out what its all about.

This can lead during the process of rewriting a sentence to a distinct sensation of having to think backwards first and then to reverse the sentence so that it reads more like natural English, whatever that is in a global world where SMS-speak is partly replacing English, Dutch and Bahasa Indonesia as previously spoken and written.

Can u c me b4 6. OK? At least its short. What would Shakespeare have done with it?

So should we still teach grammar and how to speak proper or let a new generation produce a new language. It reminds me of when I asked a French diplomat in Quebec what she really thought of Canadian French – and she said to me “Ils ont assassine notre langue!“ – “They have assassinated our language!”.

But as sure as God made little apples English is being assassinated by technology and rapid change. Should we resist it or accept it? B4 its 2 late ?

Luckily I used to work in Brussels with what was then the Common Market and is now the European Union. That was great training for understanding things backwards. We used to make terrific mistakes in documents in the European Commission and occasionally I used to let them pass if they were very funny.

I once edited a letter in French to the European Delegation in Gaberone about beef in Botswana, on all the reasons why Botswana´s phyto-sanitary safeguards might not be the best in the universe, hence leading to the opposite of uninhibited beef exports to Europe.

It was supposed to be headed ´safeguard clause´ or “clos de saufgarde. But the Commissioner in charge of relations with Botswana was then Claude Cheysson.

So the secretary thoughtfully headed the letter with “Claude de saufgarde” (Claude to safeguard) which made terrific sense, conveying with great brevity not only the restrictions, but who was enforcing them. So I sent it to Botswana anyway and uncorrected in the hope this would give them less to beef about.

Business and economics desks are particularly dangerous for making mistakes, as you have to understand a little bit about the content as well as the English, not fall asleep, and your fingers must not fall on the wrong key when you do so.

So we should all sympathize with the copy editor, deeply immersed in the complexity of sugar economics, who recently attempted to buffer the sugar price, and due to the proximity of the g with the f on the Qwerty keyboard, buggered it instead.

I worked last year for two months with the Jamaican sugar industry and they told me that it was only the fluctuations in the Euro to the US Dollar that was holding off the effect of the EU reducing sugar prices through the Sugar Protocol, so they were pretty certain that their sugar prices would soon get buggered as well.

So my advice is, if that’s the way its going for you, what with globalization, the EU Sugar Protocol, not to mention the new EU Economic Partnership Agreements, banks going bust and the collapse of your stock market shares and pension scheme, that you should not delay and get yourself an uninhibited island soon, before we´re all buggered.

Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.

-Sri Lanka Guardian