February 9, 2016 edition
If there is one icon that marks our times, it is the hand phone. The Indonesian word for it is perfect: 'telepon genggam' or 'clutched phone'. We can clutch it any time, anywhere, but it, too, can hold us in its clutches any time, anywhere. Whenever someone sits alone in a corner, or together with a friend in a caf, on a crowded bus or attends a village meeting, out comes the HP from the pocket, eyes scan the messages on the narrow screen, and attention is momentarily diverted. More often than not, conversation stops.
These days, the first thing we see in the morning when we wake up, even before turning on the light, is not the newspaper, not the radio, not the TV. It is the hand phone: the Samsung, Nokia, Motorola...
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
February 2, 2016 edition
A militant is someone who makes himself vanish in order to become something effective, terrifying, overwhelming. Saaman, the character in Pramoedya's novel Keluarga Gerilya (The Guerilla Family), is at age 23 already a guerilla leader in Jakarta then occupied by Dutch forces, and he plans a series of killingsincluding that of his own stepfather who is on the other side. Saaman is captured. But he knows he has to die, just as he has to kill. He is a militant.
Some say that the term 'militant' is from ancient Latin, meaning 'mile-goers'. It probably refers to fortitude, including the bearing of pain and exhaustion, voluntarily, when moving towards something whose meaning is greater than oneself.
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January 26, 2016 edition
What can we do with the past, when we stand stunned in the ruins of Hatra?
Just a few years ago in the desert between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in the midst of a flat brownish dried up river basin about 300 kilometers from Baghdad, the ruins of the ancient town of Hadra still lay to the north. The ruins of the city walls rose high. Archaeologists said that the brick wallwhich protected life 2,200 years agowas a kind of circular fortress two kilometers in diameter. It was also an astonishing feat of architecture: if you walked around it you found four gates, eleven bastions, 28 large towers and 160 small towers.
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January 19, 2016 edition
Hatred is strength. Anger is force. Darth Vader understood this. And probably so, too, those who have formulated political words and acts since the 20th century: from Hitler to Donald Trump, from Stalin to IS, from the Ku Klux Klan to Pol Pot, from the Red Guards to the Islamic Defenders Front. They incite anger, they spread hatred, and then they turn both of them into 'ideology' and from then on who knows how many victories are celebrated and how many millions of bodies pile up.
Anger, hatred, violencethey differ from one another and do not always have a relationship of cause and effect. Yet how often we see the three fused, both in history and in imagination.
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January 12, 2016 edition
Since time immemorial, enmity between 'the Dark side' and 'the Light' has been the stuff of legend; in the third century CE a Persian called the 'Prophet Mani' articulated it, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, Star Wars repeated it.
Indeed, Manichaeism does not die easily; its dualistic cosmology has made 'the Dark' and 'the Light', bad and good, in perpetual conflict in the universeso clear and simple that it is easy for people to just accept it.
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January 5, 2016 edition