Tale of A Jakarta Commuter

Many will skip breakfast. Some even can only kiss their sons and daughters foreheads without even seeing them wakeup. They need to get out of their home before 6 a.m. Indeed, some of them requires to get out of their home and hit the street before the clocks ring five times. Their homes being on the outside of the city where they work and needs to get at the office before the clock strikes seven or eight.

And they have to fight their ways through the infamously insane, poisonous, and murderous traffics of Jakarta.

The roads of Jakarta are the stages for the amateur racers who drive the local buses. Those racers will drive their racing vehicles, who also carry other 10-20 people, along the narrow and bumpy roads of Jakarta. They have to face obstacles in form of treacherous potholes, speed-reducing bumps (or called "the sleeping police"), people who cross the streets like there are no cars speeding on it, people pulling carts, boys who chase kites, and simply other buses.

Alongside the buses, there are other racers of smaller but more numerous scales: bikers. Those racers ride their two-strokes and four-strokes rides like they are on a race tracks. Sometimes they even think they are on an off-road races, tackling potholes, bumpy roads, and overtake pedestrian ways. Some of them thinks that their rides are the extensions of their limbs and drive like there are no possible hazards coming to them, hence the bravest of them don't wear helm. Sometimes, there are other people (up to three) hithcing their rides and think that when there are accidents, the only one who are affected are the drivers, so they don't wear helmets. Have I told you that up to five humans can share a single four-strokes automatic-geared semi-scooter bikes designed to lift only two?

Sometimes there are deadlock happened on crossroads, even when the traffic lights are fully functionals. Can you imagine buses only inches away from each others and choking up traffics? Can you imagine there are no police around to fix the jam? Can you feel the choking atmosphere inside the buses, with people trapped inside, stuffed like sardines? Now add Carbon Monoxide spewed by some buses and under-preserved engines populating Jakarta streets, and you will feel choked indeed.

The commuters have no choices. They have to brace the jungle of moving metals and layers upon layers of smogs to reach their working places. There are no feasible dwellings within their financials reach available in Jakarta. They are either expensives, in form of apartements which are not the favorable form of dwellings for the family-oriented Indonesians, or simply located on strange locations like right behind office towers.

So they have to brace through the thick layers of insanity while breathing on poisons and putting their brains on high gears to avoid bumping into accidents.

And they have to be extra healthy because sometimes they have to brace through torrents of rain and got stuck in a traffic jam while doing it. The rain is sometimes acidic and corrode their beings. They need to repel it with canvas coverall and a healthy being and steel-grade willpowers.

And willpower is their true weapons against the insanity of Jakarta. They have wives, husbands, children, and extended families to feed. They have futures to protect.

They have lives to support.