In many democratic countries, civil servant or PNS (pegawai negeri sipil) never been a booming “industry”. Rather, it’s the second choice for the young potential & dynamic citizens, even in India. Not in Indonesia. Here, the demand to be a PNS has always been beyond the existing supply. So, for the corrupts Indonesian officials (who are not, anyway?) who got direct or indirect authority to select the new breed of corrupt ‘potentials’, any PNS recruitment day is a harvest season. Time to buy a new luxury car.

For PNS in relatively low level (high school teacher), you need to pay at least Rs 20 million ($2,000), so some of my PNS friends told me their own experience. Mostly through loan. Therefore, corruption practices and corrupt mindset are actually born the time you apply to be a PNS. When your monthly salary are just around $100, how you pay the debt back with your hand still clean? Just a case in point, see special report from Jakarta Post here.

Picture: Baharuddin Lopa the few good men in Indonesia politics

What differentiate between a person with leadership personality and a mere manager? The answer is plenty and will be in a very long list. I’ll just wanna pick up few of those. The order might not necessarily on priority basis.

(1) While the former thinks more on common cause and interest, the latter is busy to sharpen his skill for his own cause;

 The most embarassing things in life are inter-religious hatred among religious followers. And it’s even more embarassing to see that this phenomenon prevail among the so-called ‘the three most-sacred and most-influential’ religion: Islam, Christian and Jews. I dont know, and it’s not important as well, who hate whom first. The damaged has been done, is still developing and deteriorating by the day.

It’s not the right place for me to analyse it from politico-historical point of view here in this page, although if you are curious enough to know you can click through the links –at the end of this posting– to my previous op-ed pieces (in Bahasa Indonesia) scattered in several Indonesian newspapers regarding this i ssue.

Everyone, every religious followers should go back towards the basic purpose on why he/she sticks to and choose certain religion during his/her lifetime: as life guidance. To guide your mental stability whenever you are in desperate situation; to look for solace in time of agony; to strengthen your mind at the time when your heart cannot be strengthen by a glass of beer, etc. In other words, the sole aim of religion and the purpose of being religious are to have inner peace.

Inter-religious relation is just like inter-personal friendship. You gotta maintain a take-and-give balancing act in order to make sustainable friendship. In personal friendship, either side should try to maintain give-more-and-take-less principle, not the other way round. The more you implement this principle, the more friends you’ll have.

Take-and-give principle certainly not only limited to material things. The significance thing in this concept is it symbolizes the spirit of making your friend happy first, and he/she’ll make you happy too sooner or later. In other words, never try or make him/her unhappy intentionally or unintentionally. Once it happens, the breaking up is underway, especially if you offend him/her in a big way, on a sensitive matter to him/her.

Whether you are geographically or ideologically in the East or in the West, you’ll be tempted or at least hard to resist the temptation to conclude and believe that the current brouhaha between the East (Islam) and the West (Christianity) as a result of Denmark cartoon controversy as a strong sign of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization thesis. If you think and believe so, you are wrong.

The truth is it’s the clash of fundamentalism: the the no less dogma-bound secular fundamentalism in the West and the religious fundamentalism in the East.

First, religious fundamentalism and the often violent censorship it seeks to impose, is certainly not limited to Islam. In Britain, Sikh agitators disrupted the staging of a play (written by a Sikh) which depicted a rape scene in a Gurdwara.

Finally, Indonesian current President SBY (Susilo Bambang Yudoyono) launched his own website. The first of its kind. It’s a bit similar with a blog equipped with podcast, RSS feed, although without comment box. So, you can put it into your My Yahoo, or Google Fusion if you want.

The site contains anything relating to the President activities: from his own speeches on various occasions, interviews and news, including his SMS number, PO Box, and guestbook (I’ve tried the guestbook, it’s not working). Predictably, it’ll be a hit in no time.

Soul searching, self-reflection or self-criticism if you like are a tendency of an individual, society or nation that has been undergoing sort of anxiety kind of feeling. It used to happen when one feels there’s something wrong with him/her in case of individual, or in case of nation/country, with the nation/state. Soul searching in a big way done by an individual will make him/her a good philosopher, poet, . Hence the emergence of Sigmund Freud, Plato, Aristoteles, Kahlil Gibran, etc.