Blogging School

Today, 108 years ago, Soekarno was born. He is the first president of Indonesia who has declared Indonesian independence in August 1945. This son of a Javanese primary school teacher, an aristocrat named Raden Soekemi Sosrodihardjo and his Balinese wife named Ida Ayu Nyoman Rai from Buleleng regency, was born as Kusno Sosrodihardjo in Blitar, East Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

Following Javanese aristocrat custom, he has sent by his father to Surabaya in 1916 to attend a secondary school. In 1921, he began to study at the Technische Hogeschool (Technical Institute) in Bandung. There, he studied civil engineering and focused on architecture.
In his studies, Soekarno was “intensely modern,” both in architecture and in politics. Atypically, even among the colony’s small-educated elite, Soekarno was fluent in several languages. In addition to the Javanese language of his childhood, he was a master of Sundanese, Balinese and of Indonesian, and especially strong in Dutch. He was also quite comfortable in German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, all of which were taught at his HBS.

Soekarno was a cool man who has married nine women –although not at one time. They were Oetari, Inggit Garnasih, Fatmawati, Hartini, Kartini Manoppo, Ratna Sari Dewi Soekarno, Haryati, Yurike Sanger, and Heldy Djafar. From these nine wives, Fatmawati was the “most valuable”. Soekarno’s sons and daughters of Fatmawati are the political figure today. Moreover, Megawati Soekarnoputri the eldest is the fifth president of Indonesia and the candidate of seventh president of Indonesia.