Myanmar

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen
You could have flown away
A singing bird in an open cage
Who will only fly, only fly for freedom

Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t fly away when she could have.

She wasn’t there to accept her Nobel Peace prize in 1990. She wasn’t by her husband’s side when he died of cancer in 1999, and hasn’t been able to see her two sons since the 1980’s.

She stayed behind to be with her people – knowing full well that they would lock her away again.

It’s been 12 long years.


Walk on, walk on
What you got, they can't steal it
No they can't even feel it
Walk on, walk on
Stay safe tonight...

They walked.

They prayed.

They knew full well that they would be brutally murdered, as were thousands before them.

They offered blessings.

The first ones have been killed.

There will be more.

They weren’t safe last night, as hundreds of them were rounded up and taken away under the cover of darkness – but tomorrow they’ll walk on.

Two years ago, I traveled through Myanmar along with Eugene. It is a beautiful country of wonderful people cruelly oppressed by a remorseless military junta. “Imagine a city left five years ago by a colonial power. Now throw in 30 years of decay - and add a military dictatorship”, I wrote in my journal.

It is difficult to imagine that 45 years ago, this was one of the wealthiest countries in Asia.

We spoke to the people of freedom, and of the one they call their ‘lady’. We met two comedians who had spent six years in jail for telling jokes at the expense of the regime. And for two days, we spent time with the leader of a group of dissident monks we will call Z (I have no desire to get him in trouble). We ended up teaching a group of monks about democratic concepts, political science vocabulary, internet censorship and how to avoid it, and the history and success of non-violent protests.

Lectures on democracy

Is this Z in the Herald Tribune, leading the group of peacefully protesting monks, armed with a megaphone? (Update Sept 28th - the picture in the article has unfortunately been changed.) Was he or one of his apprentices among those killed in the protests yesterday? Am I to blame for people dying?

Then again, does it really matter?

Boys - not men - trained to kill.

Z will certainly have been among the tens of thousands of peaceful protestors on the streets – and I am sure that as he would not wish me to hope that the dozens killed were his neighbors, and not he. But it would be ridiculously self-important, indeed delusional, to assume that my touristic passage through the country had any effect on a major event in an ancient nation’s proud and complex history.

What I can do is try to prevent the issue from fading away once it becomes unfashionable, the way it has in the past.

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
- Aung San Suu Kyi

Lu Maw and his brother may not seem like much - but I respect anyone who spends six years in the notorious (and aptly named) "Insein Prison", and comes back out only to continue the political jibes that got them there. Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old when her father was assassinated - the same year he won independence for Burma from Britain. Are these children next?How young is too young?
Bagan Beauty


Credits:
Some of the pictures are Eugene's - the rest of his photos from the trip can be found here.
The lyrics quoted are from U2's ode to Aung San Suu Kyi, "Walk On" - click here below to listen:

Things I will miss in Egypt

- My six-months-and-still-running search for an unscratched, undented car in Cairo
- The death plunge through four lanes of onrushing Cairo traffic that ironically marks the entrance into the Ministry of Transport
- Train drivers who unhook the train’s electronic circuits to power their coffee makers
- Taxi drivers taking their 1960’s black and white lada cabs on half-mile short cuts against the traffic of a busy one-way street
- The smile on my client’s faces when they realize that I’ve learned a new word in Arabic
- Attempting to run a meeting with 13 people in the room having six separate conversations in Arabic while eating, drinking, smoking and shouting to overwhelm the noise of the passing trains, even as the team leader is looks through papers, has side meetings with three people who randomly walked into the room and talks on two of the six telephones on his desk
- The Nile
- My team – pure quality
- The only five star hotel in the world where it takes two hours to respond after a guest calls to say she is bleeding from a cut and urgently needs a bandage – and no one’s surprised
- Development work
- The City of the Dead, where a community of the poorest people in Cairo has sprung up in and around an ancient Islamic graveyard – and where they welcome strangers with open arms and offer you tea at their houses
- After-work football games at 1:30 am
- Outrageous weddings and engagement parties of the super-rich
- Street food – koshari, tameya and sugar cane juice
- Working the 11th-17th hours of your day with heavy construction going on both the next floors above below… every day for several months (ok, scratch that one)
- Horse carriages unloading freight trains
- The “Dude you can’t just make shit up” look I got from the passport control guys every time I handed them my passport
- Clients who got tears in their eyes when I told them I was leaving

On to another adventure.

Of Shepherds

My paternal grandfather was a sheep farmer. As a result, my father spent much of his youth tending the sheep, as did many of my ancestors before him. The noble profession of shepherding has long been a fascination of mankind, as demonstrated by numerous references in popular media and literature (if we start with one Hollywood actor, a recent movie of Matt Damons was named “the Good Shepherd”, while the genius lead character “Good Will Hunting” [one of my favorite movies] claimed to harbor ambitions of becoming a shepherd – but more on this below).

My maternal grandfather is a dairy farmer. This to me is would seem to be no-less a noble profession. Throughout most of my country’s history, milking cows were a privilege of the better off, nobler families – and my grandfather is a highly respected man in his community. Yet, dairy farming has failed to capture the imagination of the masses the way shepherding has (for example, in ‘Independent People’, a flagship novel of Icelandic Nobel prize winning author Halldór Laxness, proud and resilient sheepfarmer Bjartur´s luck starts turning for the worse once he purchases a cow).

The human fascination with shepherding may be rooted the unusual connection shepherds seem to have to the realm of the spiritual and paranormal. Whether it is the sheep who act as a vessel facilitating this connection to world beyond I do not know – but examples abound. Icelandic shepherds historically had frequent interactions with the otherwise elusive elven folk (who in my country are considerably more treacherous and less fairy-like than those popularized by Tolkien). Another Nobel-prize winning novel, Paolo Coelho’s ‘The Alchemist’, tells of a shepherd whose mysterious dream leads him on a mystical quest to encounter his heart´s treasures. And as immortalized in countless psalms and the world’s most widely published book, a group of shepherds were there to witness the birth of Jesus.

You might think that those worthy gentlemen I mentioned last were the most famous shepherds of all – but you would be wrong. As it happens, the first half of the same book is even more widely read than the second half – and it tells the tale of another man who tended sheep a bit further to the south and west in the years after he married his wife Zipporah.

Fires and aging notwithstanding, the bush is in remarkable shape.



In the version of his story that I have been told, it was indeed one of the sheep that led him to a brushfire that caused rather less damage yet had significantly more historic significance than those ravaging Greece today – for it was then that God first spoke to Moses.

While I won't judge whether other shepherds such as the Prophet Mohammed and the Lord Krishna were more significant, the nice thing about Moses is that everyone (or at least, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Bahá’ís) seems to agree on his story - and it was in his footsteps that I recently made a pilgrimage, climbing the biblical Mount Sinai.

We started our accent shortly after midnight, climbed through the night, and arrived at the summit to witness the dawn. The stars were magical, and the moon cast an eerie glow over the desolate mountain ranges we soon found ourselves looking down on.

The sunrise was - well - divine.

The heavens looking down on Mount Sinai

T, the girl who climbed mountains - and whose birthday it is today(September 16th)

Dobedobedo

A couple of notes I wanted to add to the last post.

The 'do' vs. 'be' thought is completely plagiarized from my friend Mike (though I really didn’t do it justice). When he first mentioned it, my reaction was that I’d like to be able to 'Do' things, but still manage to just 'Be'. In fact, that's what I was going to Do. He looked at me as if I'd told a joke, and I let him think that it was, but the truth is I had said it completely unconsciously. See why I worry? Dobedobedo was actually also put in print by Hazel after reading my last post, but I didn’t actually steal that one – in fact, it is my increasingly appropriate nickname for Dubai.

The Seattle riots image is something that's been a crystal clear image in my head since '98, symbolizing how I changed when my dad died. Not that I (or my sister) would have been likely to be involved in the protests, but I am certainly idealistic, was following what was going on, and the image stuck.

It was later that I decided that doing a PhD in international relations and joining the UN would be less likely to help than doing an MBA and learning how to 'do' stuff in the heart of capitalism (London and New York at first, now Dubai – and then applying it where it’s needed. Making that switch was easy – its making the switch back that can be hard. Business school was fantastic, but it sucks you in. Soon I was running around like all the kids on campus trying to sell myself to name brand companies for not quite all the wrong reasons, but certainly some. Since then I’ve been afraid of getting lost in the capitalist world and forgetting who I really am. Hence why I ask my sisters to keep me honest, and why I'm afraid to leave what's one of the most notoriously bad projects in my company - not just because it's closely connected to development, but because I might end up being happier on my next project, whose ultimate aim might be making some Saudi Sheikh richer.

As it turns out, the corporate world has taken care of the dilemma for me – I was mistakenly released from my current project and immediately snapped up by the other. The two are now engaged in a tug of war over my services, which I have been advised to stay out of. It’s great – it’s like outsourcing a moral dilemma. I should market the concept. Facing a tough decision in your life? Don’t suffer through the heartaches and waking nights – we at Epiphany.com (i.e. me and a few enterprising young men in Bangalore) will make the decision for you within 10 minutes for just $29.99 ($49.99 if it’s a really important decision).