Time for a noise abatement society

Time for a noise abatement society

JAKARTA (JP): The Kopaja minibus came roaring toward me,
clashing on its sounding shield the din of war. Blazoned across
its front was the slogan Titanic. I found this less than
reassuring. I had woken up in the middle of the night on a recent
long-haul flight on Air France to see a deck suddenly tilt at a
giddy angle and witness bodies going spinning by. Somebody's dark
sense of humor, was it, to screen Titanic in the middle of the
night?

If it was I did not see the funny side of things. Momentarily
struggling in half-sleep, I thought that we were going down
somewhere over the Indian Ocean.

This all came to mind as the Kopaja roared on by. That
symbolic slogan on the front windshield seemed to say it all for
the driver; "I am going. And I don't mind how many I take with
me." I thought of the Metromini that several years back plunged
into the Sunter River, drowning 33 passengers. What exactly goes
through these drivers minds?

But, above all, it was the noise he was making. It all seemed
so needless, as indeed so much noise here does. Jakarta is what I
would like to call a cacatopia, a place where noise seems to be
of the essence, a place characterized principally by noise.
Bedlam!

If you have been in the vicinity of Block M bus terminal you
will no doubt know what I mean. There is a panopticon control
tower from which a supervisor directs the buses in and out. He
roars instructions into a microphone at a volume that would not
only waken the dead, but can surely be heard from here to the end
of the cosmos. "Metromini 66 ke Manggarai di jalur empat!
(Metromini 66 heading to Manggarai in lane 4)", he bellows, his
voice quivering over the last syllable like a whaler's harpoon
poised to dash into the flesh of the hapless animal below.

Heavens, he could strip paint off ocean-going liners and make
stones weep with this delivery. But he is not the only one in
these parts so enamored with the sound of his own voice that if
he were made of chocolate he'd lick himself. Car calls are
another source of this unnecessary noise. If you ever loiter at
the bus stop outside any of the main office buildings, you'll see
what I mean. Try the Bank Indonesia HQ on Jl. Thamrin for
starters. Drivers are being paged as if they are either extremely
hard of hearing or they are already in Surabaya.

In the days when Golden Truli department store was still
extant, its food courts were a fine place to get an affordable
local meal. But you would not go often. Their public address
system seemed to have been designed by someone whose mother and
father had conceived them in a force 10 gale and could only
communicate by shouting.

The recent election campaign gave us all an unsurpassable
opportunity to study the Jakartan love of noise. When hundreds of
thousands of party supporters took to the streets to tout and
toot for their favorites, they came on droves of motorbikes like
shoals of fierce, barking piranha. And doubtless among the main
beneficiaries of this grunt-fest have been the hearing aid
manufacturers, for it is mighty difficult to see how the human
ear could for long resist that onslaught of sound.

For a recent visa run I decided to go to Kuching instead of
Singapore and to do this I took the PELNI ferry to Pontianak.
Waiting for it to leave Tanjung Priok, we were assailed by music
-- techno I believe it is called -- played at the fullest
possible volume on the dockside. There was no stopping it, no
place to hide from this pestilence, which might have been audible
several kilometers out to sea.

Several years ago a then regular letter writer to The Jakarta
Post complained bitterly about the noise in the street outside
his house. It seemed gongs and hawkers' cries were his bane. I
thought him wrong. Gongs have a mellow plangency to them that I
find reassuring. If only so many of the other sounds were
hearing-friendly!

Surely the time has come for Indonesia to have a Noise
Abatement Society as is the case elsewhere in the world. This
group of worthies would devote themselves to the identification
of the sources of excessive or unnecessary noise and then to its
elimination. They could start helpfully with the bajaj, that
chainsaw orchestra on wheels, and then move on to buses and
trucks. There would be probably work for them for years to come.
But let them begin.

-- David Jardine