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June 16, 2015 edition

Engraved on a 15-meter-high stone pillar are 14 eternal edicts. Carved in the 2nd century BCE, the edicts were made by Piyadasi or Devanampiyadasi, the king who ruled the area that now forms most of India.
Almost all its lines are fascinating, but the most stirring is the seventh edict:

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More Sidelines articles in other editions

June 9, 2015 edition

-For Haidar Bagir
Love: an explanation that has thrilled and confused for centuries; a word that easily becomes banal and yet can also make people ready to surrender themselves. We cannot define it. It is not part of what we know conceptually.

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June 2, 2015 edition

It was a ship's doctor who gave a name to Indonesia. In 1861, Adolf Bastian, from Bremen in Germany, was sailing in Southeast Asia. Later he wrote a few books. One of them became widely read: Indonesien oder die Inseln des Malayischen Archipels, 1884-1894. And it was from this book that 'Indonesia' began to be widely used to name the archipelago.
Bastian was influential because he was not merely a ship's doctor. He was a graduate of law and biology, and he was interested in the science that in his day was called 'ethnology'; but he was also a doctor. The fact that he became a ship's doctor shows that he wanted to explore other parts of the world. In 1873, he helped establish the Museum fr Vlkerkunde in Berlin, with its huge collection of man-made artifacts from all corners of the globe.

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May 26, 2015 edition

Money can link all kinds of things, distant and close. It reminds me of the film The Cup.
In a monastery in the Himalayan foothills, a novice monk called Orgyen is suffering from an addiction to something worldly: he is obsessed with football. The World Cup is on, and France and Brazil have made it to the final. Orgyen and his friend Lodo organize their friends to chip in to hire a television set and parabola from an Indian trader in the village opposite.

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May 19, 2015 edition

A pimp, or someone looking like a pimp but dressed like Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken asks about God. "What does God look like? And what does He do?"
In Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore (Umibe no Kafuka) the fictive Colonel leads Hoshino from the bordello to the edge of the woods. It is there that he suddenly poses this question. Hoshino is momentarily confused, and then replies, "Don't ask me. God's God. He's everywhere, watching what we do, judging whether it's good or bad."

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May 12, 2015 edition

A father wanted to witness the death sentence being carried out. He wanted to watch a vicious murderer killed: in Algiers, in late 1913, a field laborer had murdered a family of farmers, including the children,and also robbed his victims.

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May 5, 2015 edition

At the age of 12 he already knew a lot about anger. And it was with a past like this that he came to Bandung in 1955. Richard Wright: the witness who had been oppressed since childhood, like the inhabitants of Africa and Asia in colonial times, and who eventually liberated themselves.
During those days, in the road once called the Grote Postweg (the Great Post Road), Wright, the black writer, saw something important in the life histories of people like him: "The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessedin short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting."

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