Instead of counting their blessings, the fact that they can still pay their rent and bring food to their table through their office jobs – taking into account that many people in Jakarta are unemployed and still live in poverty – the privileged lives they lead, which open their access to various resources, have inflated their expectations unrealistically.

Their educational background and professional skills instead have turned these people into entitled brats, they feel they deserve a more exciting life owing to their privileged context.

Just look at Maya, the 29-year-old female character in Indonesian writer Nuril Basri’s latest novel Rasa (Feelings) published simultaneously this year in Indonesia and Malaysia. She is a fictitious character, but she reminds us of our fellow urbanites.

Maya already works as an account manager in a corporation, a job that pays her bills. Her life comforts, apparently, are not enough for her. Maya complains she is “feeling old”, that she is “lost in confusion”. She senses she deserves a more exciting fate in her life than “merely” taking care of her company’s sales matters.

Growing up in a very conservative and pious family, with overbearing parents, Maya has never had sex by the age of 29, apparently deemed by the author as an anomaly in Jakarta, a city where casual sex thrives alongside religious fundamentalism.

She feels imprisoned by her dull day-to-day activities: no sex, no romance and no adventures. So, she quits her office job and applies for a position as a waitress on an international cruise ship. She flies to Estonia to travel with the ship around the world, meeting people from all corners of the globe with all sorts of peculiar behaviors on the cruise.

Popular

The fragile promise of pluralism, religious freedom in Southeast Asia

Coffee, gold push up inflation to 1.95 percent in April

Furniture exporters decry new quarantine rule