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As a precocious child, he soon got the nickname of Djago (Rooster or Champion). He could run faster, jump higher, learn more quickly than anybody else; when he felt arrogant, which was often, he would learn more than the teacher knew, then tell the teacher how backward he was.
At 14, his father sent him to live as a foster son with a Surabaja businessman named Tjokroaminoto, a pioneer nationalist and writer who drew his political ideas from Islam, Marx and George Bernard Shaw. Tjokroaminoto's home was a meeting place of revolutionaries—one of whom, Muso, a Communist, was later to die leading the Madiun uprising against Sukarno—but the quick-witted young Sukarno was soon Tjokroaminoto's favorite. His foster father brought Sukarno up to be a politician, trained him in oratory, nationalism, political organization, and gave him his daughter, Siti Utari, in marriage. In 1920 Sukarno became one of the first dozen Indonesians admitted to a new Dutch technical college in Bandung.
Sukarno graduated as a civil engineer ("The most promising student we ever had," said his Dutch professors) but turned down engineering offers from several Dutch firms. In a characteristic scene that was to be often repeated in his life, Sukarno broke with his mentor, Tjokroaminoto, divorced his young wife, and promptly married another one, a well-to-do widow named Inggit Garnasih.
"Above Such Foolishness." It was then that he began his long association with Dr. Mohammed Hatta, who was everything that Sukarno was not—scholarly, sober-minded, steeped in Western culture, profoundly democratic. Hatta's family had been wealthy enough to send him to study economics in The Netherlands. He returned home, as passionate a nationalist as Sukarno, but aware also that there were other currents of thought in The Netherlands than colonialism, and other white men than imperialist oppressors. Sukarno and Hatta have differed most of their lives, and the history of Indonesia's politics is largely a history of their quarrels and their reconciliations. But their friendship has run steady through it all.
The Dutch spotted Hatta first. When Hatta was arrested, Sukarno used his "martyrdom" to unite several revolutionary factions under his own leadership. At 26, he became the best-known nationalist in Indonesia, a position he has never relinquished. He was also such a frequent patron of Bandung's brothels that his fellow conspirators, who were mostly good Moslems, argued that his behavior would ruin him and the movement. Sukarno replied that his personal life was no one's responsibility but his own, and went off to another brothel to prove his point. "Even then," recalls an associate, "discipline was for other people, not for him. He was above such foolishness."