September 8, 2015 edition
The police found a truck abandoned in a remote Austrian village on the side of the highway between Vienna and Budapest. There was a putrid smell. Soon it became clear why: seventy-one rotting bodies were inside the truck. Corpses of migrants. They died most probably of suffocation, lack of oxygen where they were hiding or had been hidden, full of fear and hope that they could make it across Austria.
Doom has become routine in the lives of those who no longer have a homelandthose who travel great distances to change their fate. Just a few days before the truck was found in the village of Parndorf, 40 people were found dead in the Mediterranean, piled up in a boat that had left the coast of Libya five hours earlier headed for Italy. They had been killed by petrol fumes in the cramped, overheated engine room.
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
September 1, 2015 edition
Science begins with a child's wonder.
Alfred Russell Wallace-the Englishman who together with Charles Darwin discovered the 'theory of evolution'-noted how, as a child, he had been fascinated watching bees. He found bees a marvel in every meadow, and thought anyone unfamiliar with them missed out on an endless source of enjoyment and fascination.
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August 25, 2015 edition
Revolution is never careful. There is no revolution carried out carefully, meticulously, and protected from going astray. Going astray is what revolution is about. Revolution does not set out to follow what has been laid out by the power that preceded it.
This is why August 17, 1945, was a revolutionary moment: on that morning the birth of a new country was declared. The rulers of the Netherlands Indies, so neat and repressive, had fallen. The Japanese military regime, so strong and cruel, had also lost. They were no more. Power relations in Indonesian changed radically.
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August 17, 2015 edition
August 11, 2015 edition
In a sandy desert, a shepherd withdrew from a prophet's anger. In Jalaluddin Rumi's well-known storyfrom the MasnaviMoses hears a shepherd uttering a strange prayer: "Oh God, show me where Thou art, that I may become Thy servant. I will clean Thy shoes and comb Thy hair, and sew Thy clothes, and fetch Thee milk.".
Moses saw this passionate prayer as the seed of heathenism. To compare God to a person who needs milk was irreverent.
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August 4, 2015 edition
Oh, God, we cannot meet again
In prayer with the congregation
-Sitor Situmorang, Chartres Cathedral
Maybe he wanted silence. But could he lose himself in the quiet, could he escape from 'prayer with the congregation' in this impressive gothic cathedral, a gathering place for the faithful, pilgrims and tourists? "[T]his anonymous glory, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand quiring shout of affirmation," Orson Wells praised Chartres when he used the cathedral as the setting for his last major film, F for Fake. Wells was merely one of millions of visitors fascinated with this 12th century edifice.
It is indeed not easy to be quiet. Cathedrals and churches are expressions of religion as an institution that shapes people into congregations. Congregations are identities that appear stable, but actually can change-sometimes as a fraternity, sometimes as a unit in arms, sometimes as a crowd, From time to time, a crowd that gathers without any clear shape can change into a gang, a collectivity producing energy. Whatever its shape, within it destiny is not 'each person's own silence', to use Chairil Anwar's phrase. Destiny, in that collectivity, is the tramp of a parade, the crash of waves.
In prayer with the congregation
-Sitor Situmorang, Chartres Cathedral
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July 28, 2015 edition