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Taken from KeelyNet BBS (214) 324-3501
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May 8, 1993
KETOK.ASC
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from NEXUS New Times - Volume 2, Number 13 ,Published in Australia
(soon to be in the USA) (tell Duncan you heard about them from
KeelyNet) Subscriptions $40 for six issues/one year
$75 for twelve issues/two years
Nexus Magazine
PO Box 30
Mapleton Qld. 4560
Australia
Tel (074) 429 280 - FAX (074) 429 381
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Magic Mechanics
Jakarta, Indonesia - The World Bank knows that Indonesia's economic
problems can't be solved by magic. But fixing the boss's car is
another matter.
Just ask Nicholas Hope, resident director of the World Bank's office
here. After an accident damaged his Toyota Crown, a local garage
said repairs - mainly body work - would take two weeks and cost
$700. Too long and too much, Mr. Hope's staff decided, turning
instead to a practitioner of 'ketok magic', or magic knock, an
Indonesian hybrid in which mechanics tap unearthly powers to better
wield their socket wrenches and spot-welders.
Half a day later the car came back, fully restored. The bill came
to just $122, and now, more than 18 months later, the car "still
looks fine," Mr. Hope says.
Thousands of ketok-magic shops have opened in Indonesia in recent
years. Workers in these garages protray themselves as merely the
tools of a magic spirit with which they can commune after long
periods of fasting and rigorous study.
These magicians prefer to practise their trade with no outsider
looking on. At Ketok Magic Nusantara, which fixed Mr. Hope's car,
visitors are kept from the inner sanctum by an iron fence. Another
garage bars customers from viewing the tools.
All of Indonesia's under-the-hood sages claim ties to a day labourer
from East Java named Turut, who acquired a reputation as a kind of
Merlin among mechanics before he died in 1986. Eddy Susanto, a 32-
year-old worker at Ketok Magic Nusantara, says that, as a child, he
saw Mr. Turut pick up a length of railway track with his bare hands
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and tie it around his waist. Says Mr. Susanto: "It convinced me he
wasn't an ordinary person."
Mr. Turut guided Mr. Susanto and 29 other self-proclaimed disciples
through a training regimen. They earned the right both to practise
ketok magic and to train others, but proselytizing has proven
difficult. Young people "aren't patient to learn the magic things,"
Mr. Susanto says.
Sceptics abound. Ishak Ismail, owner of a Buyong Motors, a
conventional Jakarta garage, says: "I don't believe in such a thing.
I do the real things. No magic."
Tarsikun, the driver who delivered Mr. Hope's World Bank car to its
ketok doctor, is also dubious. He says that while waiting outside,
he heard loud noises that "didn't sound like magic." Still, he
adds, "the results are OK, and much faster than ordinary workshops."
Source : The Wall Street Journal - 5 Feb 93'
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Vangard Sciences/KeelyNet
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