From the Wooden Rulers of Medan to the Soil of Bintan: A 1981 London Reflection on Freedom and the Ouroboros of Life
It started with a faded, red-tinted photograph and the time on the iconic Big Ben was 12:20 PM in the afternoon of a typical London lunchtime. I can't recalled the exact date but likely in mid September 1981, I was standing looking towards the bridge that's no more there today it was the original Bridge Street in Westminster. Looking at that eighteen-year-old teen standing in a heavy overcoat against the silhouette of Big Ben, the temptation was to simply restore the color—to scrub away the chemical decay of time and leave a crisp, idealized blue sky. But history, like life, is rarely that tidy. It was a chilly afternoon autumn day in London.
The teenager just arrived in London was running on pure, intoxicating adrenaline. He wasn't a casual tourist. He was a refugee from an authoritarian educational regime.
"I felt so liberated from the sadistic ways of teaching in Indonesia back then, where a teacher's wooden ruler had a double function—one for geometry, and a terribly sinister one to beat students. I was so happy to be out of that hellish school."
Stepping onto a Singapore Airlines 747 jumbo jetliner from the new Changi airport—refueling in Bahrain perhaps in the dead of night—it wasn't just a flight. It was a prison break. The destination was Brockwood Park School in the Hampshire countryside, an educational sanctuary founded on the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was sent there by his father, an active Theosophist who had quietly fortified his son’s childhood mind with a home library steeped in occult books, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the classic Wayang Purwa comics of R.A. Kosasih.
The transition was surreal. After a brief two-week acclimatization in a Parsons Green apartment in Fulham, navigating the English language through ears trained mostly by shortwave broadcasts from Radio Australia, he was driven down to the school. He walked into the principal's office to meet Mrs. Dorothy Simmons the legendary principal chosen directly by Krishnamurti himself. Prepared for defensive survival, he found an elderly, dignified woman with no educational weapons on her desk—only a kindly dog named Whisper.
The Warmth of Small Class and the Living Philosophy
In a small, warm classroom of six to eight students, heated by hissing gas pipes, the language barrier dissolved into deeper inquiries. There was Wendy, who meticulously corrected pronunciation and behavior, and her boyfriend Steve, who introduced a word the young traveler had never heard before: Existentialism. In that space, education wasn't about compliance; it was an open-ended dialogue that seamlessly drifted into the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of the Buddha.
But the most profound lessons weren't academic. They were absorbed by watching Krishnamurti himself at the Brockwood dinner table. Watching 'K' move with absolute gentleness, waiting to go last after lunch or dinner, and showing a deep sensitivity to his environment planted seeds that took decades to fully mature. It became clear much later in life what his father meant when he wrote notes addressed to his "brother" in the margins of Madame Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence. The superficiality of life is skin-deep, but the consciousness beneath is a long-term realization.
Today, that very street architecture on Bridge Street has been completely flattened—the stone balustrades are gone, replaced by modern cycle superhighways and security bollards. The world changes its skin constantly. Yet, the inner trajectory remains completely unbroken.
The Ouroboros of the Return
In the perennial philosophy, there is no ancient emblem more fitting for this journey than the Ouroboros—the primordial snake biting its own tail. It represents the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth, the merging of the beginning and the end, and the realization that the destination we seek is often the place from which we first departed, now understood for the very first time.
The vision his father once dreamt of—running a small homestead raising ornamental fish and a banana garden—is no longer just a distant dream or a dynamic left behind in Medan. It is being physically executed and grounded into the soil of a permaculture field in Bintan. The loop has closed. The tail has met the head. The rebel who boarded the 747 in 1981 didn't just escape a harsh ruler; he walked a grand cosmic circle, utilizing decades of life to return to the earth, build his father's dream, and cultivate the very sensitivity he observed in the English countryside.
Stepping Off the Treadmill
Decades later, as the modern world wrestles with anxiety over technology and AI, doom-sayers predict a bleak future dominated by massive unemployment. But this fear only holds true if one's definition of a life lived is being a permanent cog in an economic machine, forever running the treadmill of the rat race. Life is fundamentally beyond profit and loss statements.
When automated systems and robotics assume the repetitive, soul-crushing mechanical labors that humans were never meant to endure, it isn't a menace. It is the ultimate frontier of liberation. It frees humanity to rediscover its true place and function: to shift from mechanical extraction to conscious stewardship, serving not just human economies, but the entire network of planetary beings dwelling on Earth. Tech and AI become tools that allow the snake to shed its old, mechanical skin so that humanity can step out of the machine, say Itadakimasu, and let the bura-bura walk continue. It is, at long last, the liberation to be human again.