Jogja 04 Batik

Jogja 04 Batik

After lunch visited the Plentong batik home industry at Jalan Tirtoopuran.

It was really close to traditional printing technology, as most of the work process was manual.
The worker were also very relaxed, not like me in my office.

Although I am not doing a production engineering kind of work, yet I was always put to do things in a rush.

Perhaps everyone in my office wantsto be seen as efficient worker and they do thing in fast forward mode.

As a result, so many people give me so many things to do at the same time.

But here, in Jogja, the people are more relaxed and peaceful.
The way they talk are also full of pause and musical chords.

I dun mean they sing when they talk, but, they do not talk so fast like us.

The batik designers, sat in a group of 2.

There was a a wok of liquid candle and a wok of liquid colouring agent.
It was only a mini wok.

They dip thei batik pen in the candle and draw free hand on the cloth.

Then they dip another pen into the colouring agent and spread the colouron the cloth.

I saw 2 plastic packet of items thatlooked to me like some snacks.
I asked the lady,

"Are these 2 items also used for designing batik?"

She laughed and replied in E minor,

"No...no...these 2 items are for meto eat when I am tired."

I was actually teasing them.


At another corner i saw a very familiar print of batik. Its the icon for "Wayang Kulit".
Wayang Kulit is a kind of puppet show in traditional Javanese life.

This one looks familiar because this icon is used by M Nasir, a Malaysian song composer,as his logo for his production company,Luncai Emas Sdn Bhd.

I strolled around and saw this batik mould, which looks so attractive.

The guide said that, different batik printsare used for different traditional occasion.And different print are used by different people.

There are batik for wedding ceremonies.The bride used a slightly different prints from the groom.

Of course there are batik designs for royal occasion, and, there are batik designs for royal family only, and a diffrent design for palace officials and designs for common folks too.

Phew....so hard to digest such complexities.

Back at the end were the bath for washing the printed batik.

And then, wa.lla....as we were strolling out,I met my bride....hmm

No no no not a lady...but blue batik,my favorite color.

A georaphical map was hung on the wall. It showed that Jogja or the official name, Jogjakarta, is at the southern most part of Jawa Tengah (Central Java).

The city centre of Jogja is in the middle of the Jogjakarta Province.

What did you say,

"I spelled Jogjakarta wongly...?"

No guys, I did not spelled it wongly, but,it's because Indonesia was once under theDutch.

The Dutch colonial government translated the old Bahasa Indonesia, which were written in Arabic character into Dutch Romanised alphabets.

In Dutch alphabet, "J" is pronounced as "Y"

Therefore, in short, Jogjakarta should be pronounced as "Yogyakarta".

But, the younger generation after their Independence,learnt that "J" should be pronounced as English pronounced it in the word "jungle'.

Hence, the splelling stays as Jogjakarta,but the pronunciation changed from Dutch toEnglish.