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Let’s get started with the topic of today’s edition: music in Indonesia.

The rise of home-grown music

Recently, the AFP ran a story about British music parties in Jakarta. A DJ collective called Weekenders Service Crew started student parties based on Britpop music and is now touring around Indonesia. It looks fun and reminds me of my time at Fuzz Club indie nights at Sheffield University back in my student days.

It’s cool that music is still one of the UK's cultural exports. I used to play music in a band and have always loved listening to music from all around the world, so why not explore Indonesian music? As with everything else in Indonesia, the music scene has a dynamism and energy, which is often lacking in much of Europe these days.

In Indonesia, like in much of Asia, American music is popular, and of course, so is Korean music, but local homegrown music is gaining popularity. In March, Nikkei Asia reported on the growth in homegrown music in Southeast Asia. The article focused on Indonesia and Thailand, commenting that:

In Indonesia, once a stronghold of U.S. music, the share of homegrown tunes in on-demand streaming increased to 35% last year, up 12 percentage points from three years ago, while the share of U.S. tracks dropped 5 points to 26%, according to a study based on data from U.S.-based analytics company Luminate. The share of K-pop also declined, from 12% to 8% over the same period. Similar trends are being seen in Thailand.

This can be seen in the diagram below:

Successful songs in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries often spread to other Asian countries and emerging markets. But it’s tough to break through in the US and Europe. This doesn’t surprise me. In English-speaking countries and non-English-speaking European markets, it’s hard to be successful when singing in foreign languages. Artists like Bad Bunny, Rosalía, and J Balvin have been successful in recent years, especially in the US, where Spanish-language music has now become mainstream.

Artists in Indonesia enjoy a vast domestic market of 280 million, and streaming services make it easier than ever for music to reach international audiences. Since Bahasa Indonesia isn’t a tonal language, it can be easier to grasp than some other Asian languages.

Indonesian pop music can be quite ballad-heavy, but unlike Korean and Japanese music, it isn’t as distinctive. Japanese music often features similar chord progressions, and K-pop has a certain production quality and rhythm, which makes it easily identifiable. The variety of Indonesian music is a good thing, and various genres are popular in modern Indonesian music. For this post, I’ll leave aside traditional music such as Gamelan and genres with a folk element such as Dangdut.

Here’s some recent Indonesian music that’s worth listening to. Feel free to add any recommendations in the comments! I’d love to hear more recommendations from readers.

Music Recommendations

When it comes to Indonesian music, even if her style isn’t necessarily something I usually go for, I have to mention NIKI (full name Nicole Zefanya). NIKI has a vast repertoire of styles and has become a global phenomenon.

Last year, she completed a world tour, playing on four continents and almost 40 cities, including London, New York, and Sydney. NIKI is seen as someone who represents Southeast Asian music on a global stage. Her reach is definitely helped by her singing in English, and a couple of years ago, she appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

Tiny Desk is a live music performance show on YouTube. Appearing on Tiny Desk was a significant achievement and certainly helped grow her global reach, given Tiny Desk’s 11 million subscribers.

Tiara Andini was the runner-up on Indonesia Idol season 10 in 2019-2020. After signing with Universal Music Indonesia, her debut track was Gemintang Hatiku (meaning The Stars of My Heart in English), a disco-inspired song that topped the local charts.

In 2024, she released Ngeluwihi, which features lyrics in both English and Javanese. Ngeluwihi was produced by a Korean production team, which can definitely be heard in the instrumentation—there is a definite Blackpink influence here.

I’d recommend Tiara Andini’s popular song from April 2024, Kupu—Kupu, which has a city pop vibe with a modern twist.

Morfem is an Indie Rock band that was formed in 2009. They have a decent following, with over 130k followers on Instagram, and they have toured Japan. But their popularity is far from that of the previous artists I’ve mentioned.

Their music reminds me of the style we’d get a lot of in the UK in previous years, but not so much these days. Whilst they have their definitive sound, I can hear influences of bands such as the Arctic Monkeys in songs such as Ngeri Yang Ku Damba (the fear I desire). I first found Morfem on a playlist online with their song Roman Rafah 2024, which has a catchy guitar line and solid rhythms, and I had to listen on repeat many times. Below is an example of Morfem’s sound:

I found the band Hindia last year. I was in a taxi in Jakarta when I heard the song Rumah ke Rumah. I only knew the song’s name because I used Shazam in the taxi; I just had to find out what the song was. Below is a live version of Rumah ke Rumah, which is really nice. After listening to Rumah ke Rumah many times on repeat, I then listened to Hindia’s back catalogue, which is generally good, but Rumah ke Rumah was the outstanding song.

That is, until this year. Earlier this year, Hindia recently released Doves: 25 on Blank Canvas, a mixtape rather than an album. A mix-tape is more experimental, less polished, and released more informally online than a usual album release. I have found Doves: 25 on Blank Canvas compelling and addictive listening, and thoroughly recommend it. The whole mixtape is available on streaming services and on YouTube (which includes lyrics on screen, and some songs are in English, fully or in part).

Hindia is actually the solo project of Baskara Putra, who also plays in a band called .Feast. If Hindia has more indie-pop sensibilities, .Feast is loud, heavy and raw. The track Arteri is exceptional. The song itself is well written, with an emotional edge, and the musicality is clear from the key change three-quarters in.

The video for Arteri is really well done. It shows a strained relationship against the backdrop of a packed gig in a small bar and the chaos surrounding it. Even if you don’t understand the Indonesian language, give it a listen and enjoy it nonetheless.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on how, in all societies, music and politics often mix.

Music and society always mix

Music is a form of self-expression, and whether subtly or directly, artists want to make themselves heard and spread their message.

A recent example of this in Indonesia can be seen with the band Sukatani. The punk band from central Java hit controversy with their song Bayar Bayar Bayar (Pay Pay Pay), which criticised police corruption.

The song was a viral success and was adopted by student protestors, which led to the band facing political pressure. Soon, the group released a video apology to the National Police Chief, which many suspected was done under duress.

The police offered the band employment. But, the band rejected the chance to serve as ambassadors for the police, and their popularity has only risen since the incident!

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In today’s edition, I’ll take a look at the BRICS grouping of nations.

This is a two-part series.

Part 1 will explore what the BRICS is all about. And why did Indonesia, under the Jokowi government decline to join the BRICS?

Part 2 will explore why Indonesia finally decided to join the BRICS, and the role the BRICS may play in shaping Indonesia’s future.

If this topic is something you aren’t familiar with, then don’t worry. I’m going to break it down, walk through the details and try to understand the key implications. Essentially, this is a post about Indonesia’s place in the world.

Understanding the BRICS

The term BRICS goes back to 2001. Jim O’Neill, or give him his proper title, Lord O’Neill of Gatley, was the Head of Research at Goldman Sachs and in 2001 wrote a paper titled Building Better Global Economic BRICs. At the time, the term BRICs was used in the paper to illustrate the fact that “In 2001 and 2002, real GDP growth in large emerging market economies will exceed that of the G7”. The BRICs acronym was used to signify Brazil, Russia, India and China - all fast-growing economies that were said to have strong long-term growth potential.

The BRICs were contrasted with the traditional Western grouping known as the G7. In Lord O’Neill’s paper, this contrast between the BRICs and the G7 showed that the tide was turning, that economic power was beginning to shift from West to East, a theme which is likely to be a large part of the story of the 21st century.

• G7 Countries: UK, USA, Germany, France, Japan, Italy

• BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India and China

• BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa

In 2010, South Africa was added to the BRICs. From now on, the S is capitalised to show that, while the pronunciation remains the same, the S now stands for South Africa. Even though South Africa’s economy is much smaller than that of the other four members, it has a strong industrial base and is the core centre for banking and finance in Africa. The other BRICS nations wanted to bring an African nation into the grouping to represent the wider non-Western and non-G7 world.

The first actual meeting of the BRICS was in Sanya, China, in 2011—although the countries had met without South Africa a couple of years earlier in Russia. It’s possible that such a grouping may have emerged in any case, but Jim O’Neill’s categorisation of the BRIC economies shone a spotlight on these nations. In the 2000s, the BRICs became a hot topic in the investing community, often being seen as a synonym for emerging market economies in general.

Yet, outside of just being an investment categorisation, it made sense for non-Western BRIC nations to consider how they could cooperate with each other more broadly. Especially as the impact of the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis lingered (caused by issues in the financial markets of the US and Europe), nations asked themselves if the financial system that was in place was working in their best interests.

Slow and steady in the 2010s

In the 2010s, the BRICS held annual summits. From New Delhi in 2012 to Johannesburg in 2018, each of the five member countries took turns hosting the yearly get-together. They discussed world events and areas of cooperation.

Many of these meetings in the 2010s provided the usual output. Statements affirmed solitary between BRICS members and the importance of multilateralism.

Multilateralism sounds like a good idea in itself. Of course, countries should work together, and ideally, they should do so via institutions such as the UN rather than doing things alone. However, for the BRICS nations, multilateralism has meanings beyond what many in the West would think. In the context of the BRICS, multilateralism is a call to reshape the global order:

• India, the world’s most populous country and a nuclear power, isn’t a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Neither is Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country by landmass and by far South America’s biggest country.

• The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are from North America, Europe, or Asia - this hasn’t changed since WW2 ended.

• The post-WW2 order of today has institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF, all headquartered in the United States.

• Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, these institutions seem, to many, to be very much those of a unipolar world, a world with the United States and its allies asserting institutional dominance.

• BRICS countries are not seeking a bipolar world similar to that of the Cold War, with two competing power centres. Rather, they implicitly seek a multipolar world, as opposed to what they see as a Western-led unipolar world.

• BRICS countries are all regional powers in their own right and consider their collective voices to be more diverse than those that shaped today’s institutions.

In the past twenty years, the share of global GDP that can be attributed to the BRICS doubled on a Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) basis, from 16% to 32%. Despite rising economic power and an increasing share of world GDP, the voting power of the BRICS nations in global institutions did not rise accordingly. Hence, in the 2010s, part of the BRICS agenda became crafting new institutions.

An important aspect of this process of institutional re-alignment has been the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB), which was announced following the BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2014. The NDB was announced in what became known as the Fortaleza Declaration. Today, the NDB describes itself as:

A multilateral development bank established by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) with the purpose of mobilising resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs).

The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, at the time, described the establishment of the NDB as follows:

The centrepiece of the Summit was the formal establishment of the New Development Bank (NDB) to lend initial capital of $10bn at commercial rates for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in the BRICS and other developing countries. Each of the BRICS will subscribe $10bn within 7 years giving it a total capital base of $50bn. Each will have an equal vote on policies and disbursements. The Bank’s total authorized capital will be $100bn.

The Bank will be headquartered in Shanghai. China secured its first notable international financial institution, boosting Shanghai’s major financial centre aspirations. India holds the first 5 year rotating Presidency. South Africa got the first regional centre. Russia and Brazil have the chairs the Board of Governors, and the Board of Directors respectively.

In parallel, agreement was reached on a Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) of $100bn. It aims to ‘strengthen the global financial safety net’ by providing liquidity through currency swaps to ease short term balance of payments pressures, primarily within the BRICs. China has the largest vote providing $41bn, though Russia, India and Brazil together constitute a majority.

The Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) mentioned above is also notable.

In the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis, the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, lent almost $600bn to other central banks. The Fed became known as the global lender of last resort. These liquidity swap lines helped countries get through the financial crisis, but were limited to countries in the global North, in other words, the West, and not the BRICS. Therefore, the CRA is an attempt for BRICS nations to create their own lending facility outside the purview of the West.

How well this stands up in a mega financial crisis is yet to be tested, but it’s a clear sign of the institutional realignment ongoing.

Expansion from BRICS to BRICS+

For the first time since South Africa joined in 2010, the BRICS expanded in the 2020s.

New members who joined in January 2024:

• Egypt

• Ethiopia

• Iran

• United Arab Emirates

New members who joined in January 2025:

• Indonesia

With new countries joining the organisation, the original acronym now makes less sense. Since 2024, the term BRICS+ or BRICS Plus has often been used to indicate the new larger grouping, yet officially, BRICS continues to be the organisational name.

A few months ago I was surprised to learn Indonesia was planning on joining the BRICS as Indonesia’s place in the world, had since independence been one of non-alignment. Yet Indonesia did indeed join the BRICS in January of this year.

A history of non-alignment

The policy of non-alignment was voiced by Vice President Mohammad Hatta back in 1948 in a speech titled “mendajung antara dua karang”, often translated into English as "rowing between two reefs". Hatta’s speech reflected the fact that Indonesia wanted to steer a middle ground between the US and the Soviet Union in the Cold War that was beginning to take shape at the end of the 1940s.

Then came the Bandung conference of 1955. (Bandung is one of Indonesia’s biggest cities.) Officially known as the Asia Africa Summit (Konferensi Asia–Afrika), the conference was a hugely significant meeting which brought together leaders from Asia and Africa, many of whom had recently won independence from Western nations.

Alongside the Indonesian President Sukarno were Nehru of India and Nasser of Egypt, to name just a couple of the leaders who flew to Indonesia for the conference and to lay the groundwork for what later became known as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Indonesia remained non-aligned in the subsequent decades, shunning formal military alliances yet playing a central role in ASEAN (the Southeast Asia regional grouping), and actively participating in the UN and the G20.

Indonesia hosted the G20 leaders’ summit in 2022, and Chatham House reported in a post titled Indonesia shows the value of non-aligned leadership:

Indonesia is a valuable international partner because it takes its own positions on global affairs, not because it is always like-minded. On some important questions, such as the response to human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Russia’s position on the UN Human Rights Council, Indonesia did not side with liberal democracies, because it prioritizes the protection of sovereignty and resistance to perceived external interference.

On other critical questions, such as the UN General Assembly vote to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Indonesia voted with the G7 in defence of the selfsame concept of sovereignty.Under President Joko Widodo, better known as Jokowi, Indonesia’s President from 2014 to 2024, Indonesia did not join the BRICS. Indonesia had been trying to work out it’s own path in the past years, with some rumours that Indonesia

Western officials must understand that Indonesians do not see the world in the same black and white lens that they do, assessing partner countries based on their political system and international reputation. While Indonesians are proud of their own democracy, they do not measure others by a democratic yardstick.

This analysis, from a major foreign policy think tank, offers fascinating insights into how Indonesia fits into the world. The country has steered its own path since independence, and has ensured that it’s interests are represented in its own unique way without relying on other alliances too much.

My theory is that reluctance to join the BRICS was partly due to Jokowi’s leadership style, which sought to continue Indonesia’s historic non-alignment. Jokowi has been lauded for building consensus at home and abroad, building broad coalitions within the decision-making apparatus, and offering more autonomy to regional leaders compared to his predecessors (although much more could be done here). His style was to make gradual income change, and joining the BRICS at the end of his tenure, was a step too far.

Other theories have been proposed why Indonesia didn’t join the BRICS under Jokowi. From the theory that existing members had rejected Indonesia’s membership bid, to the theory that Foreign Minister (Retno Marsudi) and Finance Minister (Sri Mulyani) opposed the idea of BRICS membership. None of these were proven. Yet in any case change was on its way.

Jokowi left power in October 2024, and by January 2025, Indonesia had joined the BRICS under new President, Prabowo Subianto. With the new presidency came significant changes. Continuity was over, and change was the new way. In part 2 of this series, we’ll look at Prabowo’s decision to join the BRICS, and what it means for Indonesia.

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Let’s get started with this edition’s topic. After a short intro to the languages of Indonesia and some thoughts on how AI can be useful in language learning, we’ll look at an example of how DeepSeek’s RI reasoning model can help with the complexity of learning languages.

The forthcoming fourth edition of Indonesia in English will look at why Indonesia has joined the BRICS, after initially deciding not to. There’s a lot to unpack in this area, and I’m looking forward to taking a deep-dive into this topic.

An very brief introduction to the languages of Indonesia

The main language of Indonesia is officially known as Bahasa Indonesia.

Colloquially or informally, in Indonesia the language may be referred to as just Bahasa, but it’s rarely called just Indonesian (perhaps only by foreigners, or those outside of the country).

The reason for this is that Indonesia has many languages, and many people speak two languages or even more. Everyone learns Bahasa Indonesia in school, and this is the main language on TV and on official documents. However, most people also speak a regional language such as Javanese, Sundanese, or Balinese - with an estimated total of more than 700 regional languages.

I call these regional languages as speaking these languages is usually dictated by the area of the country someone lives in, or grows up in. For instance, Javanese is mainly spoken by those living in the central and eastern parts of the island of Java. Sundanese is mainly spoken by those in west Java, and in Indonesia’s fourth largest city, Bandung. And Balinese is spoken on the island of Bali.

Javanese has around 100m native speakers, so despite not being the national language of Indonesia it’s in the top 20 most spoken languages in the world by the number of native speakers. But Javanese was not chosen as the national language for Indonesia post independence, as there was a strong awareness of the need to build national unity across the many cities, towns, and villages, across the many islands that make up the nation.

In the fight for independence from the Dutch, various young leaders got together in 1928 and declared the Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge). Part of this was the selection of Malay as the national language, which was later standardised as Bahasa Indonesia, with it’s local nuances and specific influences leading it to become quite distinctive from Malay in most regards, yet there remains some elements of mutual intelligibility.

Those who took Indonesia on the path to independence had front of mind the idea of national unity, which is reflected in Indonesia’s national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika or Unity in Diversity. By developing Bahasa Indonesia as a national language that could eventually be understood by almost all of the population, it helped develop a sense of nationhood and togetherness post independence.

There are parallels with having both national and regional languages in various other countries, such as Spain, where regional languages such as a Catalan, Galician, or Basque live alongside Castellano, or what is considered standard Spanish. Another example is China, where everyone learns Mandarin as their national tongue - this is what we in the West usually refer to as just Chinese, and in China is known as 普通话 (pǔtōnghuà), or common speech. Day to day many Chinese people also speak a local dialect such as Cantonese, alongside Mandarin, dependent on their province.

Note: I don’t want to get into the debate of what is a language vs a dialect, but commonly in some parts of the world the term dialect is used for languages which are mutually unintelligible, and there is an argument that many dialects are really distinctive languages.

When it comes to learning languages, most bookshops stock no end of dictionaries and phrasebooks to help someone learn French, Spanish, Italian, German, and these days Japanese, Chinese, and even Korean are popular. But Bahasa Indonesian isn’t a language you often find on the shelves, even in some of the big bookstores in London there will be just one or two books - at most - for Indonesian language learning.

These days the lack of formal written materials may not matter, as using AI may be the answer to help those of us who want to learn, or at least garner a better knowledge of, languages which are seen as less mainstream.

When it comes to using AI to learn languages there are two different ways to look at things. On the one hand, AI can help translate almost from any language to almost any other language, and the ability for AI to contextualise and translate accurately is improving on a constant basis. With this in mind, some people will undoubtedly see learning languages in a world of AI as a waste of time.

But I take the opposite view! For me, AI is great as we have almost all the learning materials we want on request, and we can ask questions and interrogate the responses in a way that you cannot with a printed “learn a language book”. Learning a language is about far more than just translating and memorising words, it gives an insight into culture, history, and importantly enables real time communication when travelling or interacting with others in their first language. AI may get to the point where communication becomes seamless even when travelling anywhere in the world, but for many people the interest, and desire, to learn language and culture authentically will always be there, and AI can be a helper in the never ending quest as a learner of a foreign language.

In the world of AI the big news this week has been the release of DeepSeek’s RI model. This has been reported on the technology website Venture Beat as follows:

As of a few days ago, only the nerdiest of nerds (I say this as one) had ever heard of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI subsidiary of the equally evocatively named High-Flyer Capital Management, a quantitative analysis (or quant) firm that initially launched in 2015.

Yet within the last few days, it’s been arguably the most discussed company in Silicon Valley. That’s largely thanks to the release of DeepSeek-R1, a new large language model (LLM) that performs “reasoning” similar to OpenAI’s current best-available model o1 — taking multiple seconds or minutes to answer hard questions and solve complex problems as it reflects on its own analysis in a step-by-step, or “chain of thought” fashion.

As someone who has experimented with Chat GPT for language learning, using DeepSeek’s R1 model over the past days has been a revelation.

The reasoning element means that you can see the “thought process” that the AI has gone through in order to get to the end result. Not only is this fascinating in itself, but you can actually learn a lot from looking at the thought process, as it provides other opportunities to interrogate the model and follow up accordingly.

For instance, one useful way to use AI for language learning is by asking for example sentences using a particular word, enabling a user to build up a conversation and expand further vocabulary in seconds rather than looking up phrases manually.

In the example that follows I’ve provided the text of the full thought process that R1 went through when thinking of the answer to the question I asked. This is completely unedited and you can see the various tangents, and self-dialogue the AI has with itself in coming to its ultimate conclusion.

Using AI to learn languages is a fascinating topic that I’ll return to again at some point.

I hope you found this exploration and example interesting even if you are not learning Bahasa Indonesia!

Question to DeepSeek’s R1:

What's the longest word in Bahasa Indonesia?

Thinking Time: 31 seconds

Okay, so the user is asking about the longest word in Bahasa Indonesia. Let me start by recalling what I know about Indonesian language structure. Indonesian, or Bahasa Indonesia, is an Austronesian language with a lot of loanwords from other languages like Sanskrit, Arabic, Dutch, and English. Words in Indonesian can be formed through affixation—adding prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, and infixes to root words. This process can create quite long words.

First, I need to confirm if there's an officially recognized longest word in Indonesian, maybe in a dictionary or some authoritative source. The Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) is the official dictionary, so checking that would be a good start. But I don't have direct access to it right now, so I'll rely on existing knowledge.

From what I remember, Indonesian can form long words by adding multiple affixes. For example, starting with a root word like "tahu" (to know), adding prefixes like "me-" and suffixes like "-kan" can make "mengetahui" (to realize). But that's not very long. However, when you add more affixes, like "memper-...-kan" or "ke-...-an", the words can get longer.

One example often cited is "mempertanggungjawabkan" which means "to be responsible for." Let's break that down: the root is "tanggung jawab" (responsibility). Adding "me-" and "per-...-kan" around it gives "mempertanggungjawabkan." That's 22 letters. But wait, is that the longest? Maybe there are longer ones.

Another possibility is "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" which means "irresponsibility." Let's see: root "tanggung jawab" again. Adding "ke-...-an" for abstract noun, "tidak" for negation, and "ber-" as a prefix. So "ke-tidak-ber-tanggungjawab-an" becomes "ketidakbertanggungjawaban." That's 25 letters. That seems longer.

Wait, let me count: k-e-t-i-d-a-k-b-e-r-t-a-n-g-g-u-n-g-j-a-w-a-b-a-n. Yes, 25 letters. Is there a longer one? Maybe if more affixes are added. For example, "mempertanggungjawabkannya" which adds "-nya" (third person possessive) to the end. That would be "mempertanggungjawabkannya" which is 25 letters as well. Let me count: m-e-m-p-e-r-t-a-n-g-g-u-n-g-j-a-w-a-b-k-a-n-n-y-a. Hmm, maybe 25 letters. So "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" and "mempertanggungjawabkannya" both have 25 letters. Are there any longer?

Another candidate might be "penanggungjawabkannya" which is "the person responsible for it." Let's see: penanggungjawab (person responsible) + -kannya. That would be p-e-n-a-n-g-g-u-n-g-j-a-w-a-b-k-a-n-n-y-a. 23 letters. So shorter than the previous ones.

Alternatively, "ketidakmampuan" (inability) is k-e-t-i-d-a-k-m-a-m-p-u-a-n, 17 letters. Not as long.

Another approach: compound words. In Indonesian, compound words are written as separate words, so they wouldn't count as a single word. For example, "rumah sakit" (hospital) is two words. So the longest words would be those formed through affixation rather than compounding.

Are there any technical or scientific terms that are very long? For example, in chemistry, but Indonesian might use loanwords. For instance, "deoksiribonukleotida" (deoxyribonucleotide) is a long loanword. Let's count: d-e-o-k-s-i-r-i-b-o-n-u-k-l-e-o-t-i-d-a. 21 letters. Still shorter than 25.

So the two candidates are "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" (25 letters) and "mempertanggungjawabkannya" (25 letters). Are there any others?

Wait, maybe "mempertanggungjawabkan" is 22 letters, and adding "-nya" makes it 25. Let me check:

mempertanggungjawabkan: m-e-m-p-e-r-t-a-n-g-g-u-n-g-j-a-w-a-b-k-a-n → 22 letters. Then "-nya" adds 3 letters, making it 25.

Similarly, "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" is k-e-t-i-d-a-k-b-e-r-t-a-n-g-g-u-n-g-j-a-w-a-b-a-n → 25 letters.

Are there any longer ones? Let's think of other roots. Maybe "mengontemporerkan" (to contemporize) but that's not as long. Or "menyepakati" (to agree), but again shorter.

Another possibility with negation and multiple affixes: "ketidakterpahaman" (the state of not being understandable). Let's see: ke-tidak-ter-paham-an. k-e-t-i-d-a-k-t-e-r-p-a-h-a-m-a-n → 20 letters. Still shorter.

Alternatively, "ketidakmungkinan" (impossibility) is 17 letters.

So, based on this, "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" and "mempertanggungjawabkannya" are both 25 letters. Are there any longer ones? Maybe with more affixes. For example, "kemempertanggungjawabkannya" but that seems incorrect because combining "ke-" with "memper-" might not be standard. Or "ketidakmempertanggungjawabkan" which would be a negation of making someone responsible, but that's getting into ungrammatical territory. Indonesian affixation has rules, and stacking too many might not be permissible.

Therefore, the two 25-letter words are likely the longest in common use. However, I should check if there are any official records or if the KBBI lists longer words. Since I can't access the KBBI right now, I'll rely on existing references. From previous knowledge, these two words are often cited as the longest in Indonesian. So, the answer would be either of these, but "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" is a noun, while the other is a verb with a possessive suffix. Both are valid, but perhaps the noun is more commonly recognized as a single word without the possessive clitic "-nya", which can sometimes be considered a separate word, though in writing it's attached.

Wait, in Indonesian, "-nya" is a suffix, so "mempertanggungjawabkannya" is written as one word. So both are valid. However, whether "-nya" is considered part of the word or a separate enclitic might affect the count. But according to standard Indonesian orthography, "-nya" is attached, so it's part of the word. Therefore, both words are 25 letters. However, "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" might be more commonly cited as the longest because it's a noun and perhaps more frequently used in formal contexts.

Alternatively, another example: "memperdebatkannya" (to debate it), which is m-e-m-p-e-r-d-e-b-a-t-k-a-n-n-y-a. That's 19 letters. Shorter.

So, after considering various possibilities and checking the affixation rules, the conclusion is that the longest words in Indonesian are 25 letters long, either "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" or "mempertanggungjawabkannya". However, some sources might list "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" as the longest. I should confirm if there's a consensus on which one is longer or if they are tied. Since both have 25 letters, they are tied. But perhaps "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" is more often mentioned. Alternatively, another word might exist with more letters, but I can't recall any. So, the final answer would be that the longest word is "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" with 25 letters, meaning 'irresponsibility' or 'the state of not being responsible'.

Answer from DeepSeek’s R1 to the question:

What's the longest word in Bahasa Indonesia?

The longest word in Bahasa Indonesia is often cited as "ketidakbertanggungjawaban" (25 letters), which means "irresponsibility" or "the state of not being responsible." This noun is formed through extensive affixation:

• Root: tanggung jawab (responsibility)

• Affixes: ke-...-an (abstract noun) + tidak (negation) + ber- (prefix)

• Structure: ke-tidak-ber-tanggungjawab-an.

Another contender is "mempertanggungjawabkannya" (25 letters), meaning "to hold someone responsible for it." This verb combines the root tanggung jawab with multiple affixes and the possessive suffix -nya:

• Affixes: memper-...-kan (causative) + -nya (third-person possessive)

• Structure: memper-tanggungjawab-kan-nya.

Both words demonstrate Indonesian's complex affixation system. While they share the same letter count, ketidakbertanggungjawaban is more commonly recognized as the longest due to its frequent use in formal contexts. Technical terms (e.g., scientific loanwords) or creative constructions might yield longer words, but these two are the most widely accepted examples.

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Let’s get started with this edition’s topic.

Football in Indonesia, with a focus on the men’s national team.

The 1938 World Cup

Indonesia’s men’s national football team is known as Pasuka Garuda - in English, this means the Garuda Squad. (A Garuda is a mythical bird that you often find in Indonesia, for instance, the national airline is called Garuda Indonesia and features a Garuda bird in its logo, and the top-left of this Substack has a small Garuda graphic.)

The team has never qualified for the FIFA World Cup as Indonesia, but they did take part in the 1938 FIFA World Cup under the name Dutch East Indies - which FIFA considers, in their records, to be the same team as post-colonial Indonesia. The Dutch East Indies got to the 1938 World Cup without playing any qualifying games. There was supposed to be a qualifying match with Japan, but Japan withdrew, and the Dutch East Indies automatically qualified.

At that time, the World Cup was a straight knockout tournament with no group stage. The one match the Dutch East Indies played at the tournament was against Hungary, which they lost 6-0. Therefore, the many weeks of travelling by ship had all been for one game. But still, Indonesia can say they were the first Asian country to compete at the FIFA World Cup. Also, their loss was to one of the finalists. (Hungary got the final, in which they lost to Italy, who retained the World Cup.)

Why do big countries struggle?

On a population basis, Indonesia has underachieved in world football, especially considering countries with populations of less than 4 million, such as Uruguay (population 3.42 million), and Croatia (population of 3.84 million) have done so well in the competition.

With football, population size doesn’t equate to success. Although it’s easy to think that the bigger the population, the easier it will be to find a great team of players. How hard can it be to find 11 starting players and some substitutes? Very hard it seems. In fact, all of the world’s top five countries by population have underperformed at the football World Cup.

• India, the world’s most populous country, has never played at a World Cup tournament. They qualified for the 1950 tournament by default as the other teams in their qualifying group pulled out, but the team decided not to participate.

• China qualified for the 2002 World Cup, co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, but lost all their games and went home without scoring a goal.

• The USA reached the semi-finals in 1930, and the quarter-finals in 2002. Since 2002, they’ve struggled, and all things considered, for a country with such a wide array of sporting success and financial means, the results haven’t been good.

• Indonesia - See above.

• Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, has never qualified for a World Cup tournament, and doesn’t seem likely to any time soon.

In the case of India and Pakistan, it’s undeniable that Cricket is a far more popular sport than football. Perhaps not playing at a World Cup finals tournament just doesn’t cause too much of a stir. For the USA and China, at various points, significant investment has been made in both their domestic leagues and national teams. But the results haven’t followed.

Indonesia’s national sport is badminton, yet it’s also a country of passionate football fans and playing at the 2026 World Cup would be a dream come true for many people in the country.

The road to World Cup 2026

When I was recently in Indonesia, the Garuda played Australia. The game ended 0-0.

I watched the game on local TV. One strange aspect of watching a football game on Indonesian TV is that there are constant adverts (commercials) that take up approximately the bottom 20% of the screen. You can still see the full game, but it gets compressed while the advert plays. It was annoying, especially the sheer number of adverts that kept popping up, it was relentless, but it's seemingly normal. I won’t complain about the adverts on British TV during half time again!

At the end of the game, the Indonesian President at that time - Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi - greeted the Indonesian players pitchside. He shook hands with every player and chatted with them, something which I can’t imagine most Western leaders doing, especially after drawing a game 0-0. But the expectations are different.

The England football team go into every major tournament hoping to win the whole tournament. This is similar for the other large European countries, such as Spain, Italy, France and Germany (for European teams, the major tournaments are the FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Championship, which are both played alternately every four years). On the other hand, for Indonesia, just qualifying to play at a World Cup would be a worthwhile achievement.

Following the Australia game, Jokowi did an interview with local media, which can be seen above. It’s worth watching to see the different attitude and expectations towards football in Indonesia compared to Western Europe. (You can enable auto-translate subtitles on YouTube if you don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia.) Firstly Jokowi praises the team and says that gaining a point from the 0-0 draw is something to celebrate of as it takes the Garuda that bit closer to their goal of qualification, for which he estimates they’ll need to get to 15 points. Secondly, Jokowi mentions that the draw was particularly pleasing, as Australia was ranked 24th in the FIFA world rankings at the time of the game, whereas Indonesia was ranked 131st. This huge gap in ranking means that Australia would have been expected to win the game, but this comes to the third point Jokowi made in this interview - the exceptional performance of Indonesia’s goal keeper Maarten Paes.

Maarten Paes and nationality

Maarten Paes plays for FC Dallas in Major League Soccer (MLS). He had played for the Dutch youth team, but he was eligible to play for Indonesia as his grandmother was born in the Dutch East Indies. She was of European descent but was born in Kediri, East Java (the largest island of Indonesia), and lived in Indonesia, at that time known as the Dutch East Indies, for several years. Maarten Paes spoke of his grandmother’s experience:

"(My grandmother) was born there, lived there for 5–6 years, and then World War II broke out. She spent several years in Spanish and Japanese camps. After that, she returned to the Netherlands by ship," he explained.

The story continued with how Maarten Paes' grandmother returned to Indonesia. According to him, she experienced losing her mother during the war.

"She returned for a few years and then went back to the Netherlands. That’s part of history. But she always spoke with gratitude about her time there, especially the time before the war.

"During the war, she lost her mother in an isolation camp. She always spoke with high respect for the nation and country. She had a tremendous influence on my life. That’s why this (playing for the Indonesian national team) feels like a tribute to her," Paes explained.

The eligibility of playing for a national team is based on several criteria. Place of birth of parents or grandparents can play a factor, but different national football associations have their own rules, which interact with FIFA’s own rulebook. Also covered by these rules are the possibility of players changing the country they represent. In Maarten Paes’ case, even though he represented the Netherlands previously, as it was before the age of 21 he was able to change his representation after taken on Indonesian citizenship earlier this year.

For some players, changing the national team they represent can be a way of playing and experiencing international football after they realise they won’t make the cut for their country of birth. In the case of Maarten Paes I think there’s more to it than that. He has a genuine warmth for Indonesia that shines through when he talks about his second homeland, and he isn’t taking an easy option by playing for the Garuda. He has to travel for 19 hours from Dallas to Jakarta when playing a home game for Indonesia. His 6”3 (191cms) frame helped him saved a penalty in his first international game for Indonesia against Saudi Arabia in early September. (Let’s be honest there’s not many Indonesians of this height.) Following this he put in a strong performance against Australia, earning presidential praise and he soon became a fan favourite.

The next steps to World Cup 2026

If Indonesia does qualify for World Cup 2026 they will be the lowest ranked team to ever qualify for a World Cup, but it’s far from impossible. They have a real chance.

Qualifying for the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) region comprises of three groups. Indonesia currently sits in third spot in Group C. This is the third round of the qualification tournament, and the first round in which teams can advance directly to the World Cup. But only the top two teams from each group go straight to the World Cup. The third and fourth-place teams in each group go into the fourth round, which is two mini-leagues of three teams. The winning teams of each of these mini-leagues advance to the World Cup, but there is even a chance for the second place teams to make it via a play off game.

Since the 0-0 draw with Australia, Indonesia’s results have been mixed.

• There was an explosive 2-2 draw with Bahrain away from home on October 10th. The game had a controversial ending - from the Indonesian perspective - as the referee played many minutes of extra time, and Bahrain scored their equaliser in the 99th minute. Bahrain has requested to move their next game with Indonesia, which will be played in Jakarta in March, to a neutral venue. But the game is still due to be played in the Indonesian capital.

• On October 15th, despite having 75% of the ball possession, Indonesia lost to China 2-1 in a game played in the Eastern Chinese coastal city of Qingdao. This game was undoubtedly a big disappointment as China are regarded as the weakest team in the group.

• On November 14th, the Garuda lost at home to Japan 0-4. Not a big surprise as Japan are an excellent team and undefeated in the group so far. It’s likely they will finish the campaign winning nearly all their games (their record so far is 5 wins and 1 draw).

• But the best news for Indonesian football for some time came on November 19th. Playing in Jakarta, Indonesia beat Saudi Arabia 2-0. Both goals came from Marselino Ferdinan, who plays for Oxford United in England (a club in the EFL Championship, the league that’s one level below the Premier League).

With the win against Saudi Arabia, the Garuda have given their qualification hopes a real chance. It will be tough, but not impossible, to come second in the group, however given how tight the group is, finishing in the top four is a real possibility. Their next two games are against Australia (A) and Bahrain (H), both of which take place in March 2025. The target will be at least three points from these two games. Before then there is the 2024 ASEAN Championship, officially known as the ASEAN Mitsubishi Electric Cup 2024.

More on nationality in football

The case of Maartin Paes got me thinking about the topic of nationality in football in more detail. It seems that some countries have caused controversy in recent years by providing citizenship to players seemingly for the purpose of them to play for the national team. Some small countries may find it hard to make up a team to a high standard, and therefore providing citizenship to a select group of players widens the talent pool to help them compete better with other teams.

In the UK, we have a strange case, there’s only one passport - that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - but there’s actually four national football teams in the UK. If a parent or grandparent is born in one part of the UK then a player is eligible to play for that national team. Or they can represent the country in which they were born. As an example, Tottenham Hotspur forward Brennan Johnson, was born in Nottingham, England, to a Jamaican father and a Welsh mother. He could have represented England, Wales, or even Jamaica. But being Welsh I’m happy that he opted for Wales!

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In today’s edition I’ll start to the answer the question of why this Substack is needed. I’ll discuss the my interest in Indonesia, why Indonesia is rarely covered in the West, and why it should be. Also you’ll find comment on what kind of topics you’ll find in this newsletter going forward, some of the key themes I’ll be covering.

Why Indonesia in English?

I first visited Indonesia more than ten years. I was impressed, especially by the scale of the city. It was a city that quickly captured my interest. Of course, Jakarta has its problems. Poverty, pollution, traffic congestion, and many other challenges that are standard in fast developing cities around the world. But the one thing that stands out about Jakarta, from a western viewpoint, is that despite being a mega-city with an energy and dynamism not seen in many other parts of the world, it’s a city that’s rarely spoken about outside of Asia.

Interestingly, compared to other capital cities in South East Asia, such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, or Bangkok, you see very few foreigners in Jakarta. Kuala Lumpur has a high proportion of toursts, and especially Chinese tourists. Singapore is a real international melting pot. This is a generalisation, but from my experience in Jakarta, it’s possible to go a day or two without hearing non-Indonesian languages or seeing tourists, except for the historic parts of Kota Tua (old town).

By some measures Jakarta will be the world’s most populous city by 2030, it’s population will reach 35.6 million, and it’ll overtake Tokyo. At the same time, Jakarta is sinking, and the capital city will move to a Nusantara in East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. The new capital is more than a two hour flight from Jakarta.

It’s not just Jakarta that the world is seemingly unfamilar with. Indonesia is a whole is a relatively unknown country. For instance, how many people know that Indonesia’s most populous island Java, has a population of over 150 million people? It’s the most populated island in the world, with a population 50% larger than Japan’s largest island (Honshu), and more than double the population of the entire United Kingdom.

What about Bali you may be thinking? We’ll come onto Bali soon. But to illustrate the point, that Indonesia is largely unknown in the West, I’d like to reference a passage from Revolusi, Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck:

Indonesia [is the] quiet giant you rarely if ever hear about outside Southeast Asia. It’s a very peculiar thing, really – in population, it’s the world’s fourth-largest country after China, India and the United States, which are all in the news constantly. It has the largest Muslim community on earth. Its economy is Southeast Asia’s biggest, and it supplies large parts of the world with palm oil, rubber and tin. But the international community just doesn’t seem interested. It’s been that way for years. In a quality bookshop in Paris, Beijing or New York, it’s easier to find books about Myanmar, Afghanistan, Korea and even Armenia (countries with tens of millions of inhabitants or fewer) than Indonesia with its population of 268 million. One out of every twenty-seven humans is Indonesian, but the rest of the world would have a hard time naming even one of the country’s inhabitants..

It’s hard to disagree with any of this. When I look in bookshops in London, books about Indonesia are few and far between, and the ones you do find are often long sweeping histories rather than anything specific. It seems publishers are not interested in books about Indonesia, at least not in English. Partly, this is likely related to colonialism. In the UK we tend to have a greater interest in countries or regions where we had a colonial footprint, and from which we have immigrant communities.

Many of the large news organisations in the UK and US, don’t have any full time correspondents in Indonesia, which is surprising given its population and geographic location in the heart of Asia. Yet, other parts of the world, which are much smaller in terms of population get much more coverage. At times there may be reasons that other part of the world get the level of courage that they do. It may reflect the geopolitics and the human impact - see the Middle East - but did the Indonesian election earlier this year get even 1%, or even 0.1% of the coverage that the US election has received in the UK? Of course not.

(Note: The UK did control Java island for a time period, Sir Stamford Raffles captured the island from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars, but it was returned some years later. British interest then turned to the areas which we know today as Singpore and Malaysia. But this period in British history has largely been forgotten, and Indonesia is seen as a Dutch colonial endeavour - any British links have been long forgotten.)

At this point it’s worth making a comment about Bali. Many foreigners visit Bali for vacation, and in the past years it’s become a key destination for digital nomads. Sometimes I wonder how many of the foreign tourists that goto Bali even know that it’s part of Indonesia. I’ve seen business figures talk about Bali as if it’s its own state, rather than one of the thousands of islands of Indonesia. Yes it’s quite different in many ways to the rest of the country, being majority Hindu not Muslim, and also having an economy focused mainly on tourism. Many visitors compartmentalise their experience of Bali as something seperate to the wider nation of Indonesia. For Bali’s locals, alongside the happy holiday makers, there’s a dark side to Bali, captured in this recent ABC documentary titled Is Instagram ruining #Bali.

It’s useful to reference once more Revolusi, Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck. It’s only from reading this book that I got an understanding of the history of Bali. Unlike the island of Java, which came under full Dutch control in the early 19th century, the Dutch didn’t fully colonise the island of Bali until 1908. I wonder how many visitors to Bali are aware of the depth of the history, and what the island went through not too long ago.

More horrifying still were the scenes in Bali, where in 1906 and 1908 the complete courts of a number of principalities chose to commit collective suicide (puputan). Hundreds of men, women and even children walked straight towards the Dutch rifles and artillery. They were dressed in traditional white garments and carried only staffs, spears and the finely wrought traditional daggers called krises. ‘The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire went on, the fighting grew fiercer, people fell on top of each other and more and more blood flowed.’ A pregnant Balinese woman was one of the few who lived to tell the tale. ‘Persisting in passionate fury, men and women advanced, standing up for the truth without fear, to protect their country of birth, willing to lay down their lives.’ The KNIL [Dutch] soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes: women hurled their jewellery at them mockingly, courtiers stabbed themselves with their daggers and died, men were mown down by cannons. The wounded were put out of their misery by their relatives, who were killed in turn by the Dutch bullets. Then the colonial army plundered the corpses. In the puputan of 1906, an estimated 3,000 people died. ‘The battlefield was completely silent, aside from the rasp of dying breath and the cries for help heard from among the bodies.’

This is not a point about colonialism. Rather, I wanted to highlight, that Indonesia has a rich complex history which is rarely understood outside of the region. Even if you don’t care about history, Indonesia has other layers of intricacy, and complexity, whether it’s in religion, ethnic groups, traditions, food, language, natural landscapes. It’s a country that has something to offer everyone, although they may not know it yet!

In this Substack various topics will be covered with news and commentary, I want this newsletter to be a source of what’s going on in Indonesia in terms of current events, but also open to exporing wider topics of interest. In starting this Substack I was inspired by seeing excellent Substacks about China (Sinocism, Baiguan, Following The Yuan), Japan (Observing Japan), Vietnam (Vietnam Weekly), but there isn’t enough being written about Indonesia in the English language, whether on Substack or anywhere else.

If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or collaboration ideas please reach out.

Thanks for reading!