BMTH live in Jakarta 2024

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This time around Ravel gets it right and BMTH (Bring Me The Horizon) are headlining the Nexfest festival in Jakarta which also features Babymetal. In this format there is no seating - which makes for a much more intimate experience - although you do have to arrive really early if you want to pick a spot right up close to the stage.  We arrived about six hours before BMTH were scheduled to start their performance and bought plenty of drinks to stay hydrated in the tropical afternoon heat (mind you, some of those were Iceland vodka mix!) This was a gig I had long been looking forward to - especially after the debacle last year. Not everyone likes BMTH of course. For deathcore fans the band sold out. For metal heads the band is not purist enough. And for the wider mainstream audience, the band is too heavy. You can't please everyone of course but there are few bands in the rock world which can match the sheer emotional velocity of BMTH. To bring metal and even aspects of metalcore t
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Peter Sondakh and the Harvard Connection

There is some interesting news of a huge gift given to Harvard University, ostensibly to boost Indonesian studies at one of the world’s top universities: 

A $20.5 million gift -- described as one of the five largest in the Kennedy School's 74-year history -- is funding the creation of a new Institute for Asia as well as a new Indonesia Program at the Kennedy School. The Kennedy School today announced the gift from the Rajawali Foundation, the charitable arm of the PT Rajawali Corporation, one of Indonesia's largest conglomerates. The private company, founded in the early 1980s by billionaire owner and director Peter Sondakh, is a major player in cement, retailing, palm oil, hotels and other industries. 

Source: Boston.com 

This is good news of course because the US has a pretty poor reputation when it comes to research on Indonesia. So hopes are high the gift will lead to better research on the world’s largest archipelago. But why has Peter Sondakh made the gift? For purely altruistic reasons I hope, but if you’ve ever studied economic psychology you’ll know that people very rarely give money away for nothing. 

And as for the money being donated to a foreign university rather than to a university in Indonesia, that should also raise a few questions, I think. 

According to Professor Anthony Saich, director of the renamed Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School, not many Indonesians study at Harvard: 

 "I think that one of the big advantages of this gift is that Southeast Asia generally has been poorly studied and understood across Harvard, and we have barely one or two students here a year from Indonesia". 

 Well that might be true. But just look at who they do have!

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