From house to home: a journey in the city of Jakarta

"Nagme hain, shikhwe hain, kisse hain, baate hain...Baatein bhool jaati hain, yaadein yaad aati hain..."

I dont know whether it has happened with you or not, but there is a certain time in life where everything is seemingly perfect. Moving on in life, this time acquires that special place in our memories, where we visit it often. Sometimes this particular phase becomes a boon, and we remember it to give us the endurance to overcome current obstacles and experience a similar time. At other times, it becomes a bane, causing us to be left entangled in it when things currently do not seem to be going the way we want it to go. The length of this phase notwithstanding, goodness of life during this time makes us yearn for it over the entire course of our future.

The fickle-mindedness of the human mind is shown by our tendency to associate success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, good times and bad times, with external factors. In this process, we forget that there is one similarity throughout the variety of such times; OURSELVES.

Similarly, I associate Apartment Simprug Indah with the change in times for the better. Wont to normal human nature, we gave Simprug a major portion of the credit for this change and still consider it to be one of the luckiest houses for us to have stayed in. Within an year of moving into Simprug, Papa got transferred to Jakarta within the same organization. As is often said, no matter how hard we try, the things destined to happen will ultimately happen, and at their own time. There was hardly any scope of this transfer of Papa's, but it did materialize, thereby changing the times to come and making Jakarta the place where we didn't only stay, but also had a home.

The change gave our lives the boost it needed after two years of living apart. It was akin to staying at hostel, and we looked forward to our trips back to Sumatra, away from the then perceived horrible city of Jakarta. Throughout these years, Mummy became our support, and we tried to become hers. But upon Papa's transfer, we saw Jakarta like we had never before. The city which we used to associate with loneliness, had turned over its image in our minds, and become the place which it is know as throughout the rest of the world. A cosmopolitan city. We were introduced to movie theatres, malls, and most importantly, family life in this city. Somehow, the Jakarta where we stayed the first two years, seems distinctly different to the Jakarta we stayed in thereafter. And this distinction in our minds is present even till today.

From Jakarta, I completed the four most important academic years in a student's life, 9th till 12th. We went for our first Europe tour from Jakarta. My future career path was determined in Jakarta, and I came to NUS from Jakarta. It now resembles to me the place where I would want to go again. The place where I would want to work. The city where we associate many good times with. The tough times that we went through in the initial couple of years seem remote, yet not forgotten.

It is exactly this memory of the wonderful change that we had experienced in Jakarta, which I am looking to for hope now. The situation is similar now, with Jakarta having been replaced by Singapore, and my schooling replaced with my sister's. These Jakarta memories provide me the hope that things will change for the better here as well. There will be better times in Singapore, and I hope to write in this very blog an year down the line, that Singapore too provided us the image changeover which Jakarta had once done...