Oblivion the Whale and His Precious Oil

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows', first published in the fall of 1884 and later collected in the 1888 Plain Tales from the Hills collection, is the recollections of a half-caste opium addict six weeks before his death. Gabral Misquitta's entire life revolves around the lashes of his addiction. The opium den in Coppersmith's Gully, near the mosque of Wazir Khan, is both home and hearth, ruin and salvation. Isabelle Eberheardt's well-known story, 'The Oblivion Seekers', similarly recounts addiction to the same substance. While Kipling was a writer who requires no introduction, Eberheardt was somewhat more obscure. Her life reads as a tale that might have come from Kipling himself. (Please reference 'Miss Youghal's Sais', first published in the spring of 1887.) She fled from her native Geneva to North Africa in 1899. She spoke Arabic fluently, formally converted to Islam, and typically dressed as a man in order to enjoy greater freedom and mobility. In October of 1904 she died in a flash flood in Algeria when the walls of her clay house collapsed inward, trapping and drowning her.


In 1975 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was killed (assassinated) in a gun battle in Riyadh. His nephew, Prince Faisal Ibu Musaed, allegedly fired three bullets at him with a pistol at point blank range during a royal audience. It has been observed that the word 'assassin' may be derived from 'Hashshashin', a militant Sunni sect, thought to be active in the Middle East in the 8th to 14th centuries. This mystic society killed members of the Abbasid elite for political or religious reasons.

In 1942 Iran reached an agreement to allow British and Soviet troops into the country in order to protect the petroleum-rich nation from German offense. The agreement stipulated that all foreign troops would leave Iran within six months of the end of the war. By 1944 however the Allies had begun to demand oil concessions from Iran. Thirst for petroleum had by no means been satiated when the war began to reach its end in 1945, and of course by that time Great Britain and the United States had changed their attitudes toward the Soviet Union. When Truman took over from Roosevelt in April 1945 the to-be Cold War policy on the Soviets began to become doctrine, and Iran became a test case for a new boldness in international affairs. The Soviets feared that they would be denied the oil they needed from Iran and supported a rebel group based in the north. The United States reacted by accusing the Soviets of interfering with the affairs of a sovereign state. The Soviet Union negotiated an oil deal with Iran and removed its troops; almost immediately Iran reneged on the deal and violently put down the rebellion in the north.

Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables. -Paul Hawken

It seems that one of the most fundamental aspects of the procurement of petroleum in the past century has been its symbiosis with the modern global economy, in which nation states though sovereign are submitted to economic, political and military pressure in total competition for limited resources. When we discuss renewable energy, corn fields for ethanol and bio diesel and dozens and hundreds of other strategies, do we consider that competition over such instruments of global economy almost always cause some form of direct or indirect exclusionary competition? Whether the commodity is tea, opium petroleum, or the slave trade - abolished in Britain 200 years ago - somebody always suffers.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers. -Henry B. Adams

Thinking Outside the Kitchen

DENPASAR - Ngurah Sutedja leans forward in his chair and stretches his arm out to point through the window of his office, tucked in a well-lit corner of his expansive kitchen at the John Hardy workshop in Mambal, a sleepy inland farming community in central Bali. Beyond the glass, encased in a bamboo window frame, is the almost completed construction of a second kitchen devoted to what he describes as ‘pignics.’

Several men busy about carrying freshly-cut lengths of bamboo, while behind us the noise and energy resonating from Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen sound like the surging of waves breaking against rocks, as his kitchen team of twelve chefs, six stewards, and four service men and women prepare the daily organic lunch for the workshop’s seven hundred and eighty-five employees.

The ‘pignic’ kitchen, explains Mr. Sutedja, stems both from one of John Hardy’s seemingly constant stream of ideas, and also from a challenge extended to him by Cynthia, John’s energetic, striking and seemingly omniscient wife. “John came up with the idea to do a special lunch, and a few days later Cynthia ate babi guling in Jimbaran and returned home saying that it was the best she had ever had, that the skin was just perfectly crispy,” states Mr. Sutedja while laughing. “Of course I thought that I could do better, so we had to try it here at the workshop.”

But his challenge was larger than merely preparing Bali’s best babi guling – which is in itself no small feat – he had also to overcome cultural differences in preparing and serving pork in a diverse and multi-cultural work environment where Hindus, Muslims, and Christians strive to design, create and produce some of the world’s most exciting and beautiful jewelry.

Mr. Sutedja thought the problem through, and as he has consistently done during the past eight years that he has been working with John Hardy, he arrived at an innovative solution. He and his team built a special ‘pignic’ kitchen, a totally separate and self-contained environment in which to butcher, prepare and serve what is arguably the island’s best babi guling.

Mr. Sutedja’s creativity and novel approach to problem solving are nurtured in the workshop’s positive and natural environment. The property, framed by traditionally built mud walls, and containing organic vegetable gardens, fishponds, fresh fruits, and innovative bamboo-based architecture, inspires a rigorous and highly conceptual form of thinking.

The John Hardy concept of sustainability is an idea that permeates all aspects of life and labor at the workshop, from the silver designers to the gardeners and the kitchen, where one of the most distinctive elements of sustainability is used everyday.

The story goes that a while back the kitchen cooked with gas burners. A sudden lack of gas supplies on the island coincided with a special guest visit to the workshop, and Mr. Sutedja was forced to find a new way to prepare lunch. He ordered that fires be lit and dry wood be collected, and in this manner the kitchen prepared the VIP lunch. Just before the food was to be served, John Hardy himself came into the kitchen and took note of the wood fires.

“He asked me why I was cooking with wood instead of the gas burners,” smiles Mr. Sutedja. “I just explained to him that this way was the traditional Balinese way of cooking, and that it tasted better.”

After this John Hardy and Mr. Sutedja met frequently to discuss the kitchen and how to improve it in an environmentally sound, more efficient, and traditional manner. They experimented with several ideas before hitting on the rice husk stoves that are on prominent display and in daily use in Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen.

The stoves are simply creations that burn on discarded rice husk. A sack of rice husk costs Rp. 1,000, and Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen uses ten sacks per day to serve lunches and dinners to more than eight hundred people. He calculates his weekly rice husk expenditures as between Rp. 50,000 and 60,000, whereas before he spent Rp. 1,000,000 per week in cooking with gas stoves. And the food, all locally produced and mostly organic, apparently tastes much better when cooked in this way.

The rice husk stoves and the ‘pignic’ kitchen are but two examples of Mr. Sutedja’s creative thinking, something that he describes as having evolved from the nurturing and pressured demands of life at the John Hardy workshop, where constant innovation and a quest for a better way are institutionalized concepts.

“He is very creative,” states PR Manager Agatha Belinda. “We frequently encounter many challenges here. For example, we had to get ready for an event with two hundred people and wanted to do something organic. Pak Ngurah came up with the idea to use hollowed bamboo stalks as glasses and rolled lemon grass as straws. He always finds solutions to whatever problems or issues we throw at him.”

For his part, Mr. Sutedja remains modest. He is quick to smile and even quicker to praise his kitchen team for their hard work and innovation. If sustainability is about creative problem solving and using resources in fundamentally new ways, it is safe to say that Ngurah Sutedja is at the absolute fore-front of innovation in Bali; and as a Balinese from Gianyar, he hopes that more and more people take note.

“These are my challenges,” he says softly, “but there are many more problems that we must also solve together through cooperation and hard work.”

(Originally published in The Bali Times.)

From Haunted House to Tourist's House

-By A.A. Gede Ngurah Termana

When I think about my childhood, I am reminded of my friends and me happily searching for dragon flies around the banks of a river bordering a hill in my village. Although most of my time was spent in the city for schooling, the promise of these moments are what made me enthusiastic about returning to the village. Vast rolling green hills, the melodic singing of the birds, squirrels jumping between the coconut trees, the trickling of the pure river water, and the pounding current of the waterfall all became unforgettable memories or my childhood. Nevertheless, those days would turn dark and end when my friends and I would hear the shouting of our parents, “Time to come home! It’s already dark, there’s tenget out there!”

Tenget is a word that strikes fear into the hearts of the Balinese. Tenget identifies a place where one is not allowed to be after dark, or where one should not build a house; it is even a place well known for “eating” children. It is indeed a place that incites fear, and a story that I frequently heard in my youth was of children who often disappeared in a tenget area. This is not just an old wives’ tale told to children by their parents to keep them from playing outside too late. It is an actual Balinese belief because the Balinese believe in ghosts, often referred to as bhutakala. Bhutakala balance the natural cosmic life of Bali. The belief goes so far as to see a tenget area as a sort of haunted house. “Don’t play there if you don’t want to disappear,” my grandmother used to say.

Of course, a place referred to as tenget also becomes an “unproductive” place. Don’t expect to find a “For Sale” sign on a piece of land described as tenget; even if there was one it would go unnoticed and collect dust. An area such as this is seldom manicured by its owners, and rarely made into a rice paddy or garden. It is often left to grow naturally fertilized by the wanderings of cows and dogs. Usually this type of land has difficult contours which are not ideal foundations to build upon, such as steep slopes or areas too close to sandy beaches. However, it is not unusual for a place such as this to have amazing panoramic views.

A month ago I invited several American college students to my village for their orientation as part of a summer internship program in Bali. We spent the last day of the orientation swimming in the same river that I used to play in when I was a child. I spoke with them about the many foreigners who had built villas in my village. While noting this my thoughts returned to when I was a child, and I compared my childhood thoughts and impressions of tenget areas with the here and now, where places that were once called tenget have been transformed into large and beautiful buildings. “Oh, that place, it has already become a tourist’s house,” states my neighbor Pak Wayan.

“Villa” is a foreign word for most of the people in my village, one that is not an intimate part of their daily vocabulary. “The tourist’s house” is what they say when referring to a particular villa. “Yup, that’s definitely a tourist’s house. See, the person who lives there is a German tourist,” explains Pak Wayan. Of course, a tourist here means a person from overseas who has come to enjoy the natural beauty and exoticism of Bali. Tourists are often called tamu (guests), but this term is only reserved for foreigners. If an Indonesian arrives in Bali with the same purpose of enjoying the pleasures of the island, s/he will be called Nak Jawa, meaning Javanese, whether s/he is from Sulawesi, Sumatra or Kalimantan. This is because of the bias of tourism; Identification as a non-Indonesian comes first and foremost, and a non-Balinese secondly. Therefore, if you are a foreigner that has already lived in Bali for some time and owns a “tourist’s house” in Bali, it means that you will be called a tourist or tamu. It doesn’t matter if you are already married to a Balinese, can speak high Balinese or have even converted to Hinduism, you will remain a tourist; and of course the service that you receive will always be “different” because you are a tamu.

Agung is a young architect who has just finished his first villa project. He also still refers to villas as tourists’ houses. However his vocabulary is somewhat different from Pak Wayan’s, who defines a villa as a tourist’s house simply because of who inhabits it “Of course, that’s a tourist’s house. See, there is a pool and air conditioning. If it were a Balinese house, it would be full of ukiran (traditional artistic reliefs),” explains Agung. For Agung, and many like him, what is important is his reputation as an architect. He must explore and clarify the many variables that separate modernity and tradition with regard to the differences between a tourist’s house and a Balinese house. “Being able to get a villa project means that one is already an internationally qualified architect,” he explains. Before I could properly think this through, Agung adds enthusiastically: “In Bali, an architect can not be really called an architect if s/he has not yet received a villa project.”

In their own ways Pak Wayan and Agung realize that a modern identity for the Balinese and Bali itself is dependent on tourism. That is to say that if Bali and the Balinese are already involved in tourism, it follows that they can be identified as modern; or borrowing from Agung’s term, it means they have already achieved “international qualification.” On the other hand, from Pak Wayan’s definition of the word “tourist” it can be understood that tourism will always be indistinguishable from the idea of a tamu, meaning that which is not intimate with the Balinese way of life and thought. The culture of tourism is much like a tourist’s house; one can have a house in Bali but one will always be distanced from the life of the Balinese.

I am reminded of a conversation with my late grandmother. “Grandma, have you already seen the tourist’s house above the river in our village?” I asked her. “Damn tourists,” she replied, “they don’t make any sense! How can they build a house on land that’s tenget?” I could only laugh hearing her answer. I wish I could go back and ask her: “If that is so, where do the bhutakala (ghosts) live now?” But, never mind, my grandmother has already passed away to… who knows, maybe even the formerly tenget area that is now a ‘tourist’s house’ in our village.

NOTE:
We would like to thank our good friend and colleague AA Gede Ngurah Termana for contributing this piece. Termana, a native of Kesiman, East Denpasar, studied journalism and English literature in Jogjakarta. He is currently working on several journalism and film projects in Bali and beyond.