COMMENT Travelling in Indonesia, people I spoke with often quickly picked up from my slang-riddled Bahasa that I had learnt it in Malaysia. I was quite confused when I was first asked whether Malaysia or Indonesia was ‘better’ as a country.

This was a question I got very often, a question that revealed the deep-seated inferiority complex many Indonesians have towards their much richer neighbour across the Straits of Malacca.

I recently spent a couple of months in Indonesia, travelling across Java and interning as a journalist at the Jakarta bureau of a foreign news agency, working as a political journalist.

After having interned as a journalist in Malaysia, in many ways I saw Indonesia’s problems basically as the things Malaysians complain about, but being 100 times worse.

Whereas one aspect of corruption in Malaysia means infrastructure projects get delayed, money going missing and dodgy materials being used, in Indonesia things hardly get built at all.

The traffic jams in Jakarta make Kuala Lumpur seem like a rural kampung in comparison. There is no city-wide, reliable public transport and even the designated bus-only lanes are filled with cars, with the drivers simply bribing the police to keep moving.

When it floods, it inundates whole suburbs of Jakarta, forcing thousands to flee their homes on an annual basis.

Corruption and nepotism go far deeper into Indonesian society than they do in Malaysia, all the way down to school teacher appointments and to the students themselves, whose parents can bribe the teachers for good marks.

And the inequality between the slums and shopping malls in Indonesia makes one sick, and look longingly at Malaysia’s skeletal social security systems.

A country moving forward

However despite all this, Indonesia has the underlying feeling of a country moving forward. There is the feeling of a young nation finding its democratic feet.

People pour over newspapers, which have to dance around the political interests of their owners, but not government censorship.

Stalls at bus stops sell copies of Tempo magazine, the corruption investigative reports of which actually lead to government ministers, judges and members of parliament being sacked and jailed - justice that Malaysians can only dream of.

Journalists can write, opposition politicians can argue and citizens can post on the social media - all without fear of any sedition law.

While many political parties exist mainly to serve the business interests of their oligarch leaders, there are at least elections, horse-trading and political negotiations that lead to different governments, different coalitions being formed after each election.

Behind the old oligarch party leaders in Indonesia is a younger generation of popular ‘people first’ governors, of which President Joko Widodo ( right ) is the first.

The likes of Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama and Surabaya governor Tri Rismaharini paint an optimistic picture for an Indonesian polity based more on people popularity, rather than money politics.

Even for the young children from the slums on the outskirts of Jakarta, who are bused into the city each Friday and paid to hold signs and chant at rallies, politics still means something to them, even if it is just money to buy food.

Indonesians don’t feel insecure about Islam

People don’t feel insecure about the place of Islam in society and while there are deep divisions, with religious and ethnic violence existing in a way that is hardly seen in Malaysia, there isn’t a feeling that religion is politicised by the Jakarta government.

One can understand the reasons many Indonesians feel insecure towards Malaysia and can see how the Malaysian attitude of self-importance drives that. Malaysians have little interest in engaging in their region and their interactions with Indonesia almost entirely consist of cheap labour and wanting an end to the haze from Sumatra.

Malaysian statements belittling Indonesia’s regularly get news coverage in Indonesia and those I met who had worked in Malaysia have stories of unnecessary humiliation.

You will hear Indonesians pointing at Malaysia and remarking how they wished they were colonised by the British instead of the Dutch.

It’s interesting to think about how deep colonial divisions run. Despite the two shared histories, Malaysians and Indonesians now feel more animosity towards each other than kinship.

It’s also interesting to think of how different the paths the two nations have taken since colonial times.

Indonesia booted out the Dutch and went through the totalitarian dictatorship of Suharto, before the blood-soaked Reformasi delivered the country to where it is today: a fragile democracy, still young and unsure of itself, but slowly growing up.

The Malaysian journey has been entirely different. The British weren’t booted out but negotiated with, and while the long-running rule of Umno can in no way be compared to the cruelty Indonesians lived with under Suharto, there is yet to be political change in Malaysia.

Malaysia today has the money and wealth that comes from stability and development, but without the freedoms of its southern neighbour.

No sparks in Malaysia’s push for change

While there is a growing push for political change in Malaysia, there lacks that spark, that energy you see when Indonesians take to the streets in protesting something they care about.

Understandably very few Malaysians would prefer to live in Indonesia. Flying from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur, I couldn’t help but feel more relaxed on arrival. The air over KL was relatively fresher, the streets were clean, the roads mostly paved and the LRT felt like heaven.

However, I couldn’t help but think: at what cost? Reading the daily reports of arrests, it’s almost impossible to feel optimistic about Malaysia’s direction.

When Indonesians asked me to compare the countries, I had to think hard. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to add to the unnecessary humiliation Indonesians felt, either.

For me as a foreigner, there was beauty in the chaos and energy Malaysia lacked, in the madness of culture and the rush of a country of almost 250 million moving. But I know for those who live there, the chaos is infuriating, not exciting.

So I thought and I came up with an answer to the question that wasn’t a lie and but would always make Indonesians smile: “The poverty is worse, the floods are worse here, the traffic is worse and the corruption is worse here,” I would say, before adding, “But at least you have democracy.”

JARNI BLAKKARLY is a Melbourne-based Australian journalist of half Chinese-Malaysian descent. He has interned at Malaysiakini and the Agence France Presse bureau in Jakarta. He has written for the Al Jazeera English section and The Diplomat , among others. You can follow him on Twitter @JarniBlakkarly .