Toloooong! We were treated to torrid story after torrid story of Manohara being the victim of evil Malaysian princes. Then we had to sit through Manohara sinetrons. Then she was a mosque builder.
Of late, however, Manohara has had a remake and emerged as a rebel with just about any cause. She first got the demonstration bug by protesting against the Malaysian Government over the abuse of maids. Only that she pissed off fellow protesters in that occasion when the TV cameras shifted focus to her instead of the career protesters when she showed up at the Malaysian Embassy in Jakarta.
Her latest demonstration was with the cause of the month – siding with the Cicaks against the Buayas.
Now we have Manohara with her latest remake: Manohara the Intellectual, penning her thoughts on corruption in the Globe. That The Jakarta Globe would consider her in the first place for an Oped piece is intriguing. To make her piece the lead the Oped page boggles the imagination.
Perhaps (and this is the realm of pure speculation and ising-ness) Manohara was responsible for The Jakarta Globe’s site crashing this morning? Unspun’s theory is that so many readers logged into the Globe website to read the Manohara article and died laughing while they read it, so they could not log off and overloaded the site.
This from the Jakarta Globe site – read this while the site’s still up
Manohara’s Views on Indonesian Corruption: How Do We Change?
“We bribe as easily as we breathe; we are so used to paying our way out of any little inconvenience in life that we almost make it seem OK to be corrupt.”
Corruption. I first became familiar with the concept when I was in the third grade at an international school in France. One of my classmates talked about his mom getting pulled over for speeding while driving him to school. He was worried because they took her license away because of previous traffic violations. Our teacher tried to comfort the poor kid, who looked like he thought his mom was going to be sentenced to life in prison.
As the teacher explained that his mother probably just had to fill out a few forms, I interrupted her and announced proudly to the class that in my beautiful homeland of Indonesia you can just give a policeman the equivalent of a euro or so and get away with speeding!
All the other kids thought this was cool and asked me what else people in Indonesia pay for that they couldn’t in France. I didn’t need much time to think and very casually said, “Well you can pay for your identity card, getting a drivers license, passing airport security, getting into the police force — almost everything really.” The teacher chuckled and then looked me in the eye and said, “That is called bribing, and that’s what makes your country a corrupt one.”
She explained to the class the horrible effect that corruption has on a country. One thing that was extremely close to my heart was poverty, another byproduct of corruption according to the teacher. At that moment my feelings changed. From being overly confident and bragging about my country, I developed an embarrassing, sick, disappointed feeling in my gut. I felt somewhat betrayed by my motherland.
via Manohara’s Views on Indonesian Corruption: How Do We Change? – The Jakarta Globe.
Unspun 
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