Blogger Indonesia of the Week (66): Septian Budi Waluyan
SeptianIf the future of a nation–bright or grim– could be assessed from how its young generation behaves and acts, then Indonesia and concern Indonesian should take a contemplative mood for various reasons.
The costly educational fee of higher education caused by almost-zero government subsidy; the laid-back attitude of its young generation influenced much by pop-culture with its many not-so-good impacts are among things that we should care about.So, in this kind of situation any sort of healthy attitude of few young generation that we know should be noticed and given a proper appreciation. Septian Budi Waluyan, a bachelor student in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore, is a good example.
His blog talks about everything, from daily notes to reflective kind of things. I am especially impressed that he likes reading books that not only confined to his field of study: a requirement to be a thoughtful and wise personality. In one of his post, for example, he writes:
…I found how people are so diversed each other and how different it is with my homeland where three main cultures are the symbol of this unique country as chinese is the majority. Interestingly, we cannot directly assume that Singapore is identic with chinese-like white dominates US-because there are so many Asians are here and there is a little or almost zero discrimination here, even there are four official languages,i.e. English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil.
Talking about that diversity, in many media, I read that many countries were impressed by the ability of Singapore to unite them. Here, during one semester, I really didn’t find any form of offfence that the racial issue evolved. It seems from the President of Singapore is an Indian, the governmental structures which seems not to be so racist. It also seems how people here don’t think much about the difference each others. For example is in waterloo, where there are many religious places are located in the near distance. Ehm…it isn’t strange if Singapore is included the list of “1000 places too see before you die”, a book by Patricia Schultz.
What I am trying to say here is about even though Singapore is famous with its multiculturalism, I am sure there are still a lot of prejudices, racist beliefs and segregation. I will give an example. My friend told me about this happening when he was in MRT. When a chinese Singaporean girl was in the middle of many old Indian boys and separated from her friends, she suddenly shouted and said,” Hey, I am afraid here”. Isn’t it a form of prejudice and segregation or exactly a nonverbal racism? Yes, in Singapore there is no offence or anything which pertains the physical contact to others but mostly it is about nonverbal attitude toward other race or group. Well, I can say that we can’t avoid the racism and prejudice in our mind. We have a tendecy to refuse something which doesn’t suit with someone’s ideal norm. So it isn’t strange if in Singapore, people will tend to make a particular group with the same race like the analogy that the birds will tend to fly together with the same flur birds. Then the question is, is westernization the best way to make them really united?
There are some other good and thoughtful postings he wrote which surprises me that they’re written by a 18-year-old boy. I wish him good luck with his study in NTU. And we hope that he keeps updating his blog with whatever he wants to write. He is one of those few Indonesian youngster who should be emulated by other Indonesian teenagers to gain success: hardworking, reading more and less laid-back life.