Many Balinese teenagers at a crossroads

Many Balinese teenagers at a crossroads

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): As night falls on a village temple near
Denpasar, a crowd has already gathered. Vendors push their carts
along the cracked sidewalk, hawking everything from fried bananas
to children's toys to the throngs streaming into the courtyard.

A crawling line of cars, motorbikes and the inevitable tour
buses, returning from a long day of culture-hunting, snakes its
way around barricades, which proclaim "be careful -- ritual in
progress", that have been set up to control the traffic. But the
tourists who are hanging out of the bus windows with their
cameras, angling for shots of some authentic Balinese culture in
action, soon become confused.

As their telephoto lenses whir into action, what appears
framed in their viewfinders is not the typical congregation of
worshippers dressed in sarongs, temple sashes and headdresses,
but a group filled with Mohawk-haired teens decked out in the
worn jeans, nail-studded bracelets and army boots that have
become the new alternative uniform for many of Bali's youth.

As the loudspeakers that have been set up in front of the
split gate to the temple crackle to life, the assembled onlookers
begin to grow restless. The elderly grannies who have nodded off
to sleep, babies in their arms, are gently prodded awake and
catch the action.

The men who are busy playing cards and chewing betel nuts in
the public meeting hall next to the temple stop arguing about
politics and the prowess of their fighting cocks and turn an ear
toward the scene. And a mass of eager kids, some several hundred
strong, take up their position in front of the bale agung (the
temple's main ceremonial platform), that has been decorated with
bright banners and strobe lights to turn it into a stage for
tonight's event.

As they wait in anticipation, a figure steps up to the
microphone. Attired in formal ceremonial clothing, he begins to
give a speech in high Balinese, welcoming the audience to the
anniversary celebration of the village youth organization. Over
the excited shouts of the crowd, he announces the groups that
will perform: Jihad, Small Dictator, Commercial Suicide,
Recidivist and The Three Little Pigs.

The first band's lead vocalist, a skinny teenager with long,
red-streaked hair and a chain around his neck, takes to the
stage, shouting out "Pree...dom!" (freedom) in his heavily
accented English before launching into Anarchy in the U.K., a
song made famous in 1977 by British punk band The Sex Pistols. As
a horde of black-clothed boys thrashed and clashed in the temple
courtyard, one elderly village leader looked on, his face filled
with worry and confusion. "I just can't understand this," he
said.

"Where's the art in it? This is truly a sign of the Kali Yuga
age," he proclaimed, referring to the Balinese belief in the
inevitable end of the world. "Those children need to be bathed in
holy water so they'll stop acting like demons."

Several hours later, the temple courtyard is deserted. A group
of teenagers has swarmed the small warung (food stall) next to
the village meeting hall. Fueled by a potent mixture of arak
(palm liquor) and Coca-Cola, they are busy reliving details of
the night's performance. In front of the warung their motorbikes
are parked in a tangle, offering testimony as to the tastes of
their owners.

To be truly cool, according to these self-proclaimed punks,
one must remove any accessory that signals safety or comfort or
obedience to traffic regulations from one's machine. Rear view
mirrors and turn signals are broken. Wheel spokes are taken out
and rearranged in the pattern of a star. Shock breakers are
shortened to ensure a rough ride and the exhaust system is
modified to make it as noisy as possible.

Even the helmets that Indonesian law makes mandatory are used
to provide an outlet for their expressions. Using stickers,
drawings and headlines clipped from newspapers, they cover the
flimsy plastic with slogans like antimilitarism, subversive
underground and the government is a liar, along with the names of
their favorite bands.

But perhaps like anyone who tries to resist the social
structure, their stance is marked by contradictions. For example,
although they claim to be revolting against any and all
regulations of their lives, they make sure to always participate
in religious rituals.

A 16-year-old high school student, Gus Nik, said, "If you're
not diligent in your duties at the temple, you'll get called a
communist. And if you forget to ask God to protect you, you might
get attacked by leak," he warned, referring to the demons which
haunt Bali's crossroads at midnight and which are, he explained,
especially threatening to teenagers like himself who like to stay
out late at night. Gus Nik is also a firm believer in the Hindu
concept of punarbawa, or reincarnation, which he hopes will let
him live his next life in London, where he can finally meet the
pioneers of the punk rock movement he idolizes.

But despite his firm faith, he sees no strangeness in claiming
as his most beloved band the American group called Bad Religion.
And his friends are much the same.

Putra, a 17-year-old high school senior, has turned his
bedroom into a gathering place for Denpasar's disaffected youth,
covering his walls with posters proclaiming "Anarchy!" and
stickers exhorting people to "Destroy the System!" At night,
Putra even sleeps with his body wrapped in chains, a practice
admired by his friends as being the ultimate in underground chic.

Yet when his father wakes him up early in the morning, asking
him for a ride to the hotel where he works as a tour guide, Putra
switches into the polite language and respectful demeanor
traditional Balinese culture demands of its sons. Pulling on the
large helmet that he hopes will hide his face from any
prospective girlfriends who might be watching, Putra carries his
father on the back of his bike, driving slowly and carefully so
the older man will not be bothered by the bumpy road. And Gus
Nik, Putra and their friends are not, as one might expect of this
set, "antiestablishment", dismayed to see Bali turned into a
marketplace for tourist development.

Despite their T-shirts proclaiming anticapitalism, they
welcome the chance to ask foreign friends for help decoding the
English lyrics of their favorite songs. "I just wish the tourists
weren't all so interested in gamelan music and Balinese dances,"
said 18-year-old Wayan Karda. "If the tourists were all punks,
then Bali would really be the island of paradise!" he mused
wistfully, before getting onto his bike and speeding away. Before
disappearing around the corner, his friends caught a glimpse of
the new stickers he had plastered to the bike's bumper: Hindu is
My Blood and Punk Not Dead in Bali.