Different conditions breed different necessities

MELBOURNE, Australia (JP): I keep telling myself that the reason we are sent hither and thither in an Indonesian shop before we can take home the goods we purchase is so that a fair number of people can be employed.

Thus, while it seems unnecessarily time-consuming as we try our best to get things done, it ultimately has a sound reason.

However, sometimes I fail to see sound reasoning behind unpleasant events. At least not immediately.

In a shop the other day I joined a queue in front of a cashier window. Having been conditioned for years in Australia not to intrude on other people's personal space, I left a one-person space between myself and the customer in front of me, which I kept all the way to the window.

When the person in front of me had completed his transactions, I began to move forward. Lo and behold, a man slipped into my space out of nowhere. Feeling cheated, I told him that he had jumped the queue.

The man turned to look briefly at me, then continued with what he was doing without even a token apology. Those who saw the incident quietly looked away. I was seething and embarrassed at the same time. Not only was I cheated out of my right, I was also treated as if I were the one being presumptuous.

After all, what was a few more minutes of my time when I had already been waiting for 20?

It is obvious that in some aspects of life I have adopted Australian ways. While Australians are, and know they are, relatively accepting of different cultures, they normally guard their rights and privacy.

In the meantime, most Indonesians are fairly unfocused on these aspects, developing the concept of "near enough is good enough" into a fine art. If the four seater at the back of a minibus has to accommodate seven, well, so be it, other people have to get there too.

And if another driver takes your right of way, for goodness sake what's a few minutes difference?

Australians generally understand that other cultures, including Indonesia's, have different interpretations on acceptable margins of error, and as a result are fairly tolerant of lateness -- within reason -- or a change of restaurant at the last minute because of dietary requirements. That sort of thing. But life needs rules and regulations, and once we have them, we need to abide by them, they usually say.

This type of "rigidity" does not sit well in Indonesian situations. People can come unstuck in simple daily activities such as traffic conditions.

While in Dago, Bandung, recently the driver of our hired car -- a Kijang -- decided to take a shortcut. He drove into a narrow lane. Unfortunately he was not the only one who knew that route. The bumper-to-bumper traffic would have made most Australians give up in horror. However, our driver, a third-year student from a local university, seemed unperturbed.

As all the vehicles in our lane inched their way ahead, we came face-to-face with an oncoming lane of vehicles, and a number of motorcycles which quickly formed an amorphous group. It was obvious that the lane was not even wide enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic. Some vehicles on both sides had their wheels almost flush with the edges of the monsoon drains.

I had seen drivers hyperventilating and trading abuse and insults during much less hair-raising situations in Australian cities, so naturally I was expecting the worst. The atmosphere was literally thick with exhaust fumes.

It was impossible to move forward, backward or sideways. Yet, not only did I fail to see any angry faces, but after a few minutes of this impasse which felt to me like an hour, a man appeared from nowhere and began directing the traffic.

It took an eternity moving the vehicles one by one, one inch backward, two inches forward, veering this way and that, and miraculously, all drivers without exception, obeyed him, who by the way was not even a traffic officer.

Some time later, the traffic flowed again, no doubt until the next jam.

We all felt a huge relief, but I was still shaking my head an hour later. I could not see the same situation resolved so quickly in Australia. Australian drivers are a lot less tolerant than those I had seen. In fact, the whole situation would be an unlikely scene for that country. To begin with, Australian drivers would be unlikely to find themselves in a narrow lane where two lanes of traffic are going in opposite directions because town planners would have assigned one way traffic for those lanes.

Different conditions breed different necessities and develop different temperaments. Provided we are mature enough to accept this, we should have few problems in our neighborly coexistence.

-- Dewi Anggraeni