'PULANG', the Indonesian word for 'going home', is a lucky word. How many millions of people are prepared to jostle, suffer heat, discomfort, and the risk of accident, hurt and even death, in a mammoth annual ritual called 'mudik'?

The word 'mudik', to go back upstr eam, like 'pulang' conveys the idea of both space and time. Pulang means to return to one's place of origin, to that spot on earth from whence one once departed.

These days, people uphold this rit