If you take a train in Jakarta, be warned: the images that would unwind behind your windows could be too disturbing to bear for someone who is not a war correspondent or a medical doctor. It would often feel as if hundreds of thousands of the wretched of the earth decided to camp along the tracks, as if the garbage from the entire East Asia had been dumped along the rails, as if the hell really materialized here on earth, instead of threatening us from some imaginary religious realm. From the unwashed windows of the train you would see people suffering from all imaginable diseases. You would probably spot exposed wounds, faces burned by fires, terrible hernias, untreated tumors and omnipresent swollen bellies of children suffering from malnutrition. And there would also be some ailments and deformities that are simply too terrible to describe or to photograph. Jakarta, the capital city of the country hailed by the Western mainstream media as ‘democratic’, ‘toleran...