senstvt

 A Day in a Year of Dependence Another year in a journey of independence has passed. We have all the reasons to celebrate it with joy like every year. But, shouldn’t we start a tradition of making it a moment of deep reflection, to contemplate? The 17th of August, 1945, was a culmination of a concerted endeavour starting in 1908 to oppose the Dutch colonialism together as a nation. It was a new paradigm that brought a new form of resistance. It did not come out of the blue, as previous forms of resistance had failed with hundreds of thousands of lives lost. In the span of centuries of colonial presence in Indonesia, a chronological overview of resistance, expeditions and wars is presented in a tremendous book “ Koloniale oorlogen in Indonesië” written by a Dutch jounalist Piet Hagen, published in 2018. The 37-year long struggle from 1908 to 1945 was characterized by intellectual activisms, forbidden by the colonial ruler, but succeeded to garner the young minds across the arch...

  Annotation to A day in a Year of Dependence Bambang Soemarwoto, Leiden, The Netherlands The essay " A Day in a Year of Dependence " was submitted as an op-ed to The Jakarta Post. Of course, I was disappointed when I received a reply from the editor: “While your op-ed is quite reflective, we have decided not to publish the article as we deem it fails to spark new insights”. It was a moment of "lessons learned", for apparently the message did not get through. Nevertheless, I think I did succeed to write a coherent message throughout the article. As a whole it proposes a new stance towards various issues. I realized now that it is probably just too ambitious to squeeze it all into 900 words. Moreover, this was done during an afternoon, when I had a chance to take a day off because there was an IT problem that interrupted me working from home. The writing is of course based on the materials that I encountered during the past couple of months. The word count ha...