Hafiz Rahman Perjalanan

Tersusun dari Manusia

Satu hal yang aku temukan akhir-akhir ini adalah bahwa sebuah instansi yang kelihatannya “sempurna” dari luar, ternyata jika dilihat dari dalam akan kelihatan kalau “kesempurnaan” itu ternyata hanya tambal-sulam, campur-aduk, dan seringkali mereka sendiri tak bisa menjelaskan kenapa semua bisa berjalan sebaik yang kelihatan.

Contoh kasarnya: perusahaan tempatku bekerja sekarang sering berinteraksi dengan perusahaan teknologi besar seperti Facebook, Google, Apple, dan sejenisnya. Jika dilihat dari luar, perusahaan-perusahaan raksasa dengan pekerja-pekerja yang luar biasa cerdas ini terlihat sangat mengesankan. Produk-produknya tampak mentereng, fiturnya luar biasa, namanya terkenal di mana-mana. Tetapi di balik semua itu ada juga masalah-masalah besar kecil yang sepertinya tampak terlalu remeh untuk bisa terjadi.

Dan aku tidak bilang itu hal yang memalukan. Justru kurasa itu lebih mengesankan dan menghangatkan hati. Sebab, sesempurna apapun mereka kelihatannya, pada akhirnya mereka tersusun dari manusia-manusia. Dan ternyata ketika urusan sudah jatuh ke tangan manusia, tidak ada yang lepas dari kesalahan terlepas dari nama besar tempatnya bekerja atau atribut-atribut lainnya.

Dan yang melegakan buatku adalah bahwa kita yang masih jatuh bangun belajar dan mengembangkan diri sebenarnya tidak terpaut terlalu jauh dengan mereka yang karirnya sudah tinggi. Sama saja. Tidak ada programmer di dunia ini yang menulis program sekali jadi dan tidak ada masalah sama sekali. Sampai pada level tertinggi pun mereka juga sangat sering bingung ketika sebuah program tidak berjalan, dan juga ketika program yang sama mau berjalan. Orang jenius tentu ada, tetapi siapapun yang mau berusaha dan tidak menyerah, pada akhirnya akan bisa mencapai tingkat keahlian yang sama.

Karena pada akhirnya ternyata kita semua sama saja, sama-sama manusia. Tidak bisa sempurna.

Postingan lama yang terkait: Just A Bunch of People Like Us

Hafiz Rahman Perjalanan

Tentang Malang

Malang adalah kotaku, tapi hanya pada hari-hari tertentu. Apabila datang akhir minggu, atau hari-hari di mana jam kerja dan sekolah tak lagi berlaku, Malang penuh sesak menjadi milik siapa saja yang datang memenuhi jalan-jalan dan pertokoan.

Barangkali adalah baik melihat bagaimana kotaku tumbuh kian semarak, menarik perhatian banyak pihak. That it’s a good problem to have. Tetapi juga aku berpikir bahwa pada akhirnya Malang adalah kota kecil yang tidak bisa tumbuh ke mana-mana lagi. Penataan tidak segesit pendatangan.

Setidaknya pada hari-hari tertentu, Malang masih tenang, dan aku bersyukur untuk itu. Hanya saja ketika kulihat anakku dan kubayangkan masa depannya, tidak kutemukan jawaban yang tepat di mana lagi dia bisa menemui ruang lapang dan sunyi di kota ini.

 

 

Hafiz Rahman Column

Raising Good Adults

Another gem found on Reddit:

[…] parents raise good children but should instead be raising good adults. The thought blew my mind and really got me thinking.

Let kids be kids. Let them screw up occasionally and let them be sad every now and then. They’re only preparing themselves for the real world and will be ready to face it when the time comes. Most parents do a great job raising good children and when those kids grow up, they’re clueless how to handle real world problems.

There are nuances on that line of thought, of course, and I am not even sure if I know how to be a good adult, but it’s still a good thing to keep in mind.

Hafiz Rahman Perjalanan

Makadam

Aku sering tergelitik mendengar kata ‘jalan makadam’, sebab tengah bagaimana kata ‘makadam’ itu tidak terdengar seperti bahasa Indonesia–feel dan bunyinya tidak serupa kata-kata lainnya.

Hari ini aku membaca satu buku yang menjelaskan bahwa ternyata memang ada istilah “macadamization“, satu cara membuat jalan di mana lapisan-lapisan batu kecil-kecil disebar sedemikian rupa di atas permukaan jalan, ditambah sedikit campuran pengikat. Saat metode ini ditemukan, ia dianggap sebagai peningkatan dari cara pembuatan jalan sebelumnya yang harus menggunakan batu-batu besar.

400px-fall_country_road_28macadam29
Contoh jalan makadam

Metode ini sendiri dinamakan begitu karena ditemukan oleh John Loudon McAdam pada tahun 1820. Hampir dua ratus tahun yang lalu.

Hafiz Rahman Column

The Need for Speed

Yesterday was an interesting day.

I was working as usual when a couple of guys arrived at our house bearing new internet. High speed internet.

For a couple of months we have been trying to register to a new, fiber optic internet service that’s been available in our neighborhood. Our efforts were met with a brickwall, it seemed, because the company behind it was highly known to be slow and inefficient to the core. I really did not expect much, as my existing internet (provided by the same company) was pretty usable and dependable despite being relatively slow at 2 Mbps.

And then unannounced they came, and after a quick hour of pulling cables to our house and setting up the hardwares, we now have a faster 10 Mbps internet at home. This also includes some features that come with the package like cable TV (awesome, although we don’t watch TVs a lot) and landline phone (for real).

I understand that 10 Mbps is slow for some. But here in Indonesia, it’s a dream. It’s the type of internet that I’ve been yearning about for 15 years. In the meanwhile I (and many people in this country) had been using various different technologies to connect to the internet: dial up, 3G, EVDO, HSDPA, broadband, and finally this one.

Our internet used to be so slow that we never stream videos: instead we download them and watch them offline minutes or hours later.

Our internet used to be so slow that whenever we had to download something big, we queued that in a download manager before we went to sleep, and in the morning we hurriedly check our computers hoping that it all worked out successfully with no interruption.

Our internet used to be so slow that I bought GTA IV on Steam back in 2012, and I could only download and install it now, three years later.

Our internet used to be so slow that my daughter could watch videos on the iPad, or I can work; but not both at the same time.

Yesterday I downloaded a 1.6 GB file less than fifteen minutes. This is mindbogglingly fast for me. “It’s done?” I hear myself asking, “but I still want to do something else!”

Of course, this being Indonesia, you always have to expect and prepare for inexplicable issues to arise. This means I’m keeping the old broadband internet active as a backup, and so now we have two available internet connections at home. It’s now for my daughter to watch Youtube with, and we will open it up for guests and families too.

This new internet service can go up to 100 Mbps, but for that you have to pay about 250 USD a month. Not an affordable price, but as time goes by I’m sure it will go down further. I’ve waited fifteen years for this. I know I can wait a little bit more.

Hafiz Rahman Column

On Blogging

I used to blog frequently. I don’t know if nowadays I don’t blog as much because I do not have the time. I do have some free time every now and then, it’s just that there are higher priority items to be done.

I used to think about random, slice-of-life posts in my personal blogs as something that’s fun to do. A hobby. But now that I have not been blogging for a while, I begin to see some values that I’ve been missing before.

Blogging is an examination of my thoughts. Writing about something usually means replaying events, conversations, as well as my thoughts and reactions about them. This is very valuable because nowadays it feels that life goes by so fast, it can be difficult to understand what’s going on and where I’m going. I feel that writing about it will help me make more sense of it.

Blogging regularly also gives me a rough history of my growth as a human being. I have blog posts from 6 or 7 years ago where I was complaining about the silliest little things, things I wouldn’t even notice nowadays. In my archives I also have found some well-researched posts, or short posts with unexpectedly brilliant piece of thoughts that make me go, “I used to be able to come up with these before?” These are inspiring

What all this means is that I plan to write some more.

Hafiz Rahman Budaya

Kesan

Aku membaca dari sebuah buku bahwa rasa segar dan minty yang kita dapat setelah menggosok gigi tidak ada hubungannya dengan efek sehat yang diberikan oleh pasta gigi. Rasa segar itu datang dari sebuah iritan–yap, bagian dalam mulut kita teriritasi–yang ditambahkan pada pasta gigi agar kita merasa ada efek positif setelah menggosok gigi.

Aku membaca pula bahwa busa dari sabun cuci tidak ada hubungannya dengan efek bersih yang diberikan oleh sabun tersebut. Tanpa busa itu pun pakaian tetap bersih. Hanya saja pembeli ingin merasa ada efek bersih saat mencuci, dan efek itu terasa saat melihat busa yang melimpah.

Di sekeliling kita ternyata ada banyak hal-hal yang sejatinya tidak berarti, tugasnya hanya meninggalkan kesan. Sekedar seolah-olah. Namun bagi kita, kadang yang seolah-olah itu jadi lebih penting dari esensi.

Aku tidak tahu harus menyimpulkan apa dari itu semua.

Hafiz Rahman Pengingat

Bersama-sama Dalam Satu Delusi

“In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they  have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care  not what they do. We find that whole communities  suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become  simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and  run after it, till their attention was caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).

Fenomena batu akik di Indonesia, walau terkesan sebagai sesuatu yang hanya khas terjadi di masyarakat kita, sesungguhnya umum terjadi di mana-mana.

Hafiz Rahman Budaya

Swiss

bern-switzerland

Ini adalah foto kota Bern, di Swiss.

Berikut adalah komentar seorang yang pernah tinggal di sana:

I used to live in Bern in high school (my dad’s job moved our family there for a couple years — and yes, it’s actually that beautiful) and I can confirm, but it’s kind of more complicated.

It can be relaxing depending on your personality. If you don’t mind following rules, the fact that everyone else follows them is really nice. Trains are never late, bathrooms are always clean, and everyone always buys a ticket for the bus, even though the ticket checkers only come through one time out of ten.

But, the ONE TIME that you can’t buy a bus ticket because you lost your wallet or something, you are pretty much guaranteed to get checked, and the fine is outrageous and all the swiss people shake their heads at you and your parents get SO MAD (not that this ever happened to me, no way)

But that’s basically what switzerland is like.

Dua sisi mata uang.

Hafiz Rahman Excerpt

Unmournable Bodies

From Teju Cole:

The scale, intensity, and manner of the solidarity that we are seeing for the victims of the Paris killings, encouraging as it may be, indicates how easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy. This focus is part of the consensus about mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from paying proper attention to other, ongoing, instances of horrific carnage around the world: abductions and killings in Mexico, hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year, internecine massacres in the Central African Republic, and so on. And even when we rightly condemn criminals who claim to act in the name of Islam, little of our grief is extended to the numerous Muslim victims of their attacks, whether in Yemen or Nigeria—in both of which there were deadly massacres this week—or in Saudi Arabia, where, among many violations of human rights, the punishment for journalists who “insult Islam” is flogging. We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.