THE SUNDAY blackout on Aug 4 in Greater Jakarta and parts of West Java was said to be the worst in many years.

AND so we have come to the end of the End of History. Remember Francis Fukuyama? He was the American professor who declared in a book of that title, that the ferocious competition of political “isms” – capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism – which so plagued the world and ravaged societies for much of the 20th Century was over, with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.