On the day before Suharto was forced to resign his presidency in 1998, after 32 years in power, you could see fire in the skies over Jakarta. I hopped on a bus, where two young Balinese men sitting opposite me were happily singing a hymn about Dasamuka.

Dasamuka is another name for Ravana, the ten-headed evil king of Lanka in the Hindu epic Ramayana, and he was relevant in Indonesia that day: Jakarta was burning just as Lanka burned after Ravana’s defeat, but the destruction in the epic was expected to usher in a golden age, with the return of Rama from exile.

Indonesia’s finest writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died last month aged 81, would have liked that hymn, for the men on the bus were doing what he did as a writer: recounting a story from the past to explain the present. But then, in Brechtian fashion, Pramoedya would have shaken us to our senses, saying: life does not imitate art.

The above is an excerpt from the obituary “The Power of the Pen” written by Salil Tripathi in the New Statesman.

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If you look at this site, you discover that the largest number of people doing a search on Google for “sex” live in Pakistan.

The list, in descending order, runs like this: Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Viet Nam, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Poland, and Romania. (This list, when arranged according to cities, appears thus: Cairo, Delhi, Chennai, Ankara, Mumbai, Istanbul, Warsaw, Zurich, Brussels, and Chicago.)

This is the 150th year of the birth of Sigmund Freud. I wonder what he would have said about sex in the subcontinent? I’m tempted to see, among other things, evidence of the role that cybercafes perform in places like India. Even people in the lower middle-class might be able to pay for a visit to a cybercafe but can’t afford a bedroom where they sleep alone with their lover or spouse. Particularly in the bigger cities, where large families often share single rooms. Cybercafes are a popular recent social innovation: seedy joints where people download porn and emerge from their cubbyholes, often in pairs, with a glazed, slightly otherworldly, look.

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