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