Let’s see, what should I blog today ? Life wasn’t so special lately, excepting that new PC I got as an early birthday present ( I can’t thank you enough, dear Wife.. 🙂 ).
I was bored, actually. Bored to write, bored to do anything. In fact, if I can concede to you my readers, I feel that there’s just nothing exciting enough in life anymore. No, I am not intentionally being morbid. It’s just that bland taste you got in the tip of your tongue when you just ate something tasteless.
But last week, I was suddenly yanked awake by several strange things happening in Indonesia, our country with which I am engaged in a love/hate relationship. One of those things, sadly, involved a person closely related to me.
First, there’s this man Joko Susilo Suprapto from Nganjuk, a small town in East Java. Apparently, he made an outrageous claim to our President that he has the proverbial Midas Touch necessary to turn water into fuel. Strangely, the President seemed to buy it. He sent the man away with an order to report back within an agreed-upon period of time. This came to the news when the man failed to keep the appointment with the President and reportedly went missing, only to be found up lying sick on a hospital bed by ( here comes the interesting part ) Densus 88 : a special counter-terrorism squad of Indonesian army.
Don’t you all agree with me and find it strange ? No matter how hard I tried, I got a big contradiction in my head. If this man really can do what he claimed, how come nobody in the world ever heard of him ? Why did he got dismissed as a con-man when he made a presentation of his “invention” to a prominent, authoritative university in Indonesia ?
On the other hand, if he’s nothing but a complete hoax; how could the First Man of our country buy it at all ? What made him so important that the President sent a special counter-terrorism squad to guard him ? For once, I really could not guess at this answer. By the time I write this, he is still in the recovery process of whatever mysterious disease he is suffering now. I am waiting in anticipation for the continuation of this story.
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Second thing is the rather more stupid, blatant lie from a man named Achmad Zaini from I-don’t-know-where. This man claimed that he has fund as much as 18,000 trillion of IDR ( I don’t even bother to calculate the currency conversion to USD ), which would mean 35 times of Indonesia’s country yearly budget !! He told the media that he gained possession of the fund when he received inheritance from his deceased parents, in the form of bulk gold stored abroad, complete with collateral advantages and all.
This second man did not impress me as much as the first one I mentioned above. He just disgusted me. Had what he said is true, he will be richer than Mr. Bill Gates itself !! He will be the richest man in the whole damn world !! Are you trying to tell me that you’re that rich, yet somehow keep yourself off from the attention of international media, government and other powerful parties ? Mr. AZ, you have to invent better lie than that even just to fool a 10-year-old kid !!
But he, indeed, made me angrier. One of the things he planned to convince people is by staging this so-called press conference in Bandung. One of the vendors for the said event is my Father-in-law. I honestly didn’t know when he told me and my wife that he was going to Bandung for some business; that he was dealing with this man. To cut a long story short, AZ and his cronies just flatly refused to pay his bills due with a lot of excuses. I don’t care how plausible his excuses may seem to be ( My father-in-law told me that it was because there’s some “technical difficulties” ); if you are that fuckin’ rich, you just don’t hold back any payment that you have to make !!
( Wheew, that was the first time I use a swear word in this blog 🙂 ). I am so DAMN ANGRY !! See, another story has it that when the event got dismissed by the police for failing to produce a permit, the person-in-charge ( one of AZ’s team ) was put behind the bars for a while. Now, my Father-in-law heard that he could buy his way out by paying IDR 10 M ( 10 juta ) in hard cash. Even THAT was not being taken care of Achmad Zaini, the self-proclaimed Godfather. How could you let your trusted man suffer like that if you have some money, hey mister ? Don’t let me catch you in the street, I am DAMN INDIGNANT !!
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Thirdly, a well-known successful motivator threw away some crisp bills of money out of a lightweight-airplane in Serang, last Sunday. There’s really nothing wrong with this. But I do protest. As a motivator, he surely understood that there’s nothing motivating in giving people money easily like that. If our government’s BLT program was being asked by so many people because “it is not educational to give them fish. Teach them how to fish instead”; then how could you do something like that ? When I heard this story, my respect for Mr. TDW just fell flat on the ground. He instantly lost his credibility, I personally reckon.
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That’s about it. This may not be a nice post to read for some people. I didn’t even try to make it coherent. This once, just this once, please allow me to use this blog as a media to vent my frustrations of what happening in Indonesia. Underline how true is this : Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction !!