Yangon
If the international economic sanctions against
You land at a smart international airport, the taxi service at which is not intent on overcharging you. The young boy—late teens? maybe 20—at the taxi counter politely charges you the ‘unofficial’ US dollar: kyat (pron. chat) exchange rate for the day: $1= Ky 1070. He need not have done so, because the official rate is Ky450 and even my hotel gave only Ky900. (On the streets it was Ky1,020.)
Your taxi glides forward on a neat six lane road, the quality of which is every bit as good as in
Someone once said that
BUT it has plenty of cars, and fairly new ones. The roads are crowded, just short of being jammed. All right, no Lamborghinis, perhaps, but plenty of Mercs. (Many senior diplomats have Mercs. Even though the capital has shifted to Nay Pyi Taw, the diplomatic missions are still in
There is a ‘Members only lounge’ in a large bungalow on a gentle hillock. Its colonial style, low boundary wall runs along the main road. A 500 metre long internal road winds uphill from the main road to the bungalow. (Even though I don’t drink I am truly curious and want to check it out on my return to Yangon. I am in Nyaung U, Bagan, as I type this.)
There are booming Italian, French, Japanese and Korean restaurants—in addition to Burmese, Chinese and Indian. Of course, they have the same look as India’s smart British Raj restaurants, which continued till the 1980s—Firpo’s of Calcutta is one I can think of.
Most amazingly, you find the English language on signboards everywhere. Even the poor speak a smattering, as they might in literate Tamil Nadu, Kerala or
Even a street-food seller at a fair in
How come pressures to throw the English language out of
A desire to belong to the world community:
Most of the hotels that I stayed in provided us little tablets of a soap called ‘
All this fascination with Europe could be attributed to the colonial era when
Man U (Manchester United) was a club that united the imagination of the youths of
(Wasn’t
(What about consumer goods? Did we use the names of Western cities? I am thinking of a product called Afghan Snow. But that could be because of the ethnic links and atavistic attachment of many Indians with
(No. Maybe
Nivea was the only recognisable brand name seen everywhere. There was one 3M board in
American Standard seems to be the commode and urinal of choice everywhere—even at public toilets in very small towns along the highway. However, in one section of Winner Inn they had Hindware commodes and wash basins.
One truck near Mine Thouk had a large ‘Vikrant Tyres’ sticker on the driver’s cabin.
Staying in touch with the world:
The main English-language newspapers—not just Myanmar Times but also the pro-government New Light of
And how
New Light wrote about how British and American diplomats made 27 visits to the headquarters of the National League for Democracy in October 2009 alone and ‘gave small and large envelopes and parcels’ to the top leaders of the party. As a result, the paper alleged, the NLD was ‘following [the] instructions’ of the
‘Envelope’ is obviously the local expression for bribe. The Urdu press in
One major interaction with the world is through contact with tourists.
As a result even teenaged Cherry, a part-time hawker in Bagan, knew all about the fake Rolex watches and other counterfeit goods, being made in
Television is another contact. Most of the hotels that I stayed in had BBC, CNN, Chinese MTV, Chinese Channel V (an Asian music channel), an English language news channel with Chinese newsreaders, Chinese Star World, HBO and, hold your breath, Al Jazeera.
The Michael Jackson film This is it was released in
Tourism
The traditional tourist season in
In the case of
As a result hotels were full in every city that I visited. I found a vacant room only in the fourth hotel that I contacted in Nyaung Shwe. In
The world reaches out to Myanmar
Going by the headlines of even a newspaper as sober as Myanmar Times, the international community, especially the
‘We want to improve ties,
Regardless of what you read or whom you talked to, the sanctions were blamed on ‘the western lobby.’ By 2009, sanctions in
Relations with the
Contacts with the world—with Asia , really
The visit to Yangon of a team of medical specialists from
The National University of Singapore offered ‘generous scholarships’ to t people of
The minorities
The Jewish community in
The 2010 elections
‘Next year’s general elections to change political landscape of
The Internet:
In the hotel’s Internet room in
I wanted news from home. But the Times of India site had been blocked. (It had been left alone in
None of the clicks worked in
Nor was getting to my mail easy, either. (In
Just before leaving
In order to read genuine mail I first had to cut through this junk. The connection was excruciatingly slow. Yahoo mail kept disappearing and had to be restarted from time to time. Meanwhile, the café’s meter was ticking away. Deleting the junk took ages. I couldn’t even mark mails from this restaurant as ‘Spam’ because that would divert all messages from other Facebook friends to the ‘Spam’ folder.
To top it all, there was this very kindly doctor from the
Must ‘unfriend’ this restaurant when I get back to
I needed to send an urgent message to my staff in
Fortunately, Gmail was working. I have never used my Gmail account to send messages. So the e-mail addresses of my contacts were on Yahoo, not Gmail. The only e-mail ID that I have bothered to memorise is that of my brother in the
It worked.
Ingenious solutions to peculiar problems.
However, I could update my Facebook status, which was a minor relief. For a while I thought of putting a ‘Help’ message on my Facebook status bar to ask any friend who saw that status to call my secretaries and ask them to cancel the ticket. I could not send individual messages because only the Home and Profile pages of Facebook were accessible, not the Messages page. Fortunately the Gmail stratagem worked and I was spared having to make a spectacle of myself on Facebook.
Architecture: Kashmir to
It is the same on the slopes of
The simple houses built, obviously by low income people, into the sides of that hill look so much like the houses of similar income groups in Batote or even some Kashmiri villages.
The name
No, they didn’t copy us, nor did we copy them. There are only so many ways in which you can build houses with certain materials and conditions, and we both came up with the same ideas. As for the houses near
Myanmar or Burma
Before I stepped foot on the land I could only call it
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I found students of Medical College 2, all of whom were born after the renaming, still using the names
En route Mandalay
It is an 11 ½ hour bus journey from Yangon to
I choose seat 40, second last, because of the leg room. The girls at the ticket counter laughed heartily. I wondered if it was because I had chosen a turkey (They laughed like this at
When I came back after half an hour to put my luggage overhead, I found two guys with screwdrivers taking the seat apart and fixing it for my recline. They couldn’t get the lever to make the seat go up and down. So they gave it a permanent recline. (Would junior bus staff in
I got a lot of nice stares from three nice lookers while waiting for the bus. Obviously they were curious about this guy who looked neither European nor Burmeses.
One of them, 17 year old Nechi of
She asked me my name. I told her and even gave her my card. a few hours later she asked me my name again. I told her again. She realised with a laugh that she had used the wrong phrase. This time she meant, ‘What is your age?’ Obviously she had mugged up a few stock English phrases.
Equally obviously, my age was an issue for her. Naturally, I did not ask her her age. I only asked if she had a boyfriend. She giggled. ‘I am very young to have a boyfriend. I am only 17.’
I also saw a local movie on the bus. It was very long, certainly more than three hours. Very clean cut, like Tamil movies of the 1970s. The bespectacled comedian reminded me of the urbane Nagesh. The story was exactly like the Indian films of the 1960s. A shy hero hits on rich girl who lives in a huge house with a swing in the lawns. They literally bump into each other—at a mall. He keeps shyly leaving flowers and messages for her. Not a dull moment in the film. They aren’t exposed to Indian cinema. Their television shows mega-budget Chinese period films instead, with Burmese sub-titles. Again, because their nature is similar to ours the plots of their movies evolved along similar lines.
There wasn’t the slightest show of flesh in the film: not even a short skirt or a bared shoulder. All right, the odd girl with exposed ankles or in
So, short skirts are not an issue for them. It’s just that they don’t do it.
I saw several episodes of a TV serial that did not have even the slightest hint of a romance. It was about a rich irritable father, his two lazy servants and two nice looking teenaged girls, the derrieres of all of whom he would cane in every other episode. A sweet comedy set within a well to do home. Hence just two or three sets were used.
Unlike
In real life, too, monks are given extreme respect. The majority of passengers on our flight back to Kolkata were monks and nuns on their way to the ultimate Buddhist pilgrimage—Bodh Gaya. Innocent of the ways of the world, they occupied whichever seat they fancied. The Sikh gentleman whom they had displaced looked towards the airline crew to help him, but none had the courage to ask a monk to sit on his allotted seat.
When we landed at Kolkata all of us queued up at Immigration. Some monks jumped the queue and went straight to the top of the line. They also insisted on standing in the line meant for ‘Indian nationals.’ Again, no one had the heart to direct them to the correct line, or ask them to stand at the end of the queue.
In 2009,
The cross-dressing Hollywood comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, which ‘inspired’ many spin-offs in
Singing contests, on the other hand, used expensive sets and were very slick and entertaining.
Our shared customs
Thadingyut is the Myanmar Theravad equivalent of the Mahayan Himalayan festival of Lha Bab Duechen. In 2009 it fell on Oct 24. (Mahayan Buddhists celebrate it on day 22 of month 9 of their calendar.)
The festival marks the return of Lord Buddha from heaven, which he had bodily ascended to at age 41 to meet his mother and deliver sermons to the deities there. In
The days immediately before Thadingyut are observed as a Buddhist Lent in
Ram Leela, the epic play about the Hindu deity Sri Ram, staged over nine days (with a finale on the tenth day) every autumn in every major village where Hindus live in
The Ramayan[a] is called Yamayana out here and the annual Ram Leela is called ‘Yama zat daw.’ I wonder if any Ram Leela group in
There are many Yama zat daw groups in
The temperature: There was a nip at night on the road to
Keeping tabs: En route at least twice that night, we had to get off the bus, walk through some kind of a border control (a state border, perhaps) and show our national ID card—in my case, my passport.
The new capital: Late that night we passed through a very slickly laid out town. Signs said that we were in Nay Pyi Taw. That is the new capital. The roads are very wide and lit up rather well. The architecture of a very important public building was like that of the Greco-Roman Senate.
Mandalay
The Royal City Hotel,
And despite having given me my ‘included’ breakfast on the day that I checked in, she gave me a packed breakfast the next morning for the boat as well, even though I was not entitled to both. The room had a small bottle of mineral water. All this in a hotel where the base price is $6 (Rs 280 or so) for a single room!!!
Burmese tolerance: I thought that
Kitsch: Burmese Buddhists used to have such good taste in architecture and art. They too have succumbed. Many kitsch additions have been made to the otherwise exquisite Shwedagon Paya. Most notably, there is a kitsch electric halo coming out of Lord Buddha’s head in many of the chapels at Shwedagon.
The architecture of some of the pavilions at Shwedagon is almost as bad as at India’s post-independence (post-1947) religious structures, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, who succumbed to kitsch in that order, the Sikhs being the last. In
Mindblowing Mandalay. In the morning, around 10, when even the lice of
These two young ladies inaugurated the parlour by releasing gas balloons, which had been intertwined into two neat formations, into the skies. They then posed on the tiny lawn of the parlour, which was on a 500 or 600 sq. metre plot. There were around 150 onlookers, including curious passers by like I, cheering them. Cameras clicked and whirred.
‘Miss competitions’ and Myanmarese womanhood
Beauty contests in
As in South Asia, the people of
Considering how cut off
The morals of young women
‘
I spent a lot of time in
A teenaged girl travelling alone, or with a sister who might be identically dressed, in overnight buses is the norm in
And yet I never noticed any immodest behaviour among the women of
Holding hands with boyfriends was another matter. That you could see on and off even in the smallest of towns, even in tiny
MT has a ‘Socialite’ page—their equivalent of
Often rich Muslim women with headscarves covering their hair, ears and necks would appear on the ‘Socialite’ page. No Indian editor would let such sacrilege take place. It would shatter the image of his Page 3 and sales would plummet.
This is why perhaps I need to get into the right circles in
Small-town fair: In the evening, near the same crossing, where the 76th street met the 27th street, suddenly a small-town fair materialised on a stretch of road that was less than half a mile long. Apparently it was a three day fair, which shifted to a new venue every day. There was street food (I tried a Burmese egg dosa, which was very good), ‘games of skill’, balloons to be burst with air guns, a Ferris (?) wheel, a roundabout with little cars going around in a circle (as in India), some ground-level dice throwing-type Burmese game—and, above all, live pop music.
Pop music: There was a three-girl band, too! The Burmese seem to have given up on making pop music in their own tradition. All the pop that I have seen and heard on
My problem with the audience was that they did not applaud or cheer at all. Clapping is not part of the Eastern tradition. In
‘It won’t be on all night,’ a helpful hawker (who also told me where to get chapattis and Indian food) told me. ‘Only till 1.30.’ Wow! With the right fun-loving company I’d have stayed up. But got to get up at 5 tomorrow!
The Mandalay Hill is so much like the hill at
What bothered me as an Indian was a fairly large sign halfway up the beautiful, covered stairway that led to the Buddhist temple at the top, and many temples at every landing. The metal sign said ‘19th Indian (Dagger) Division/ A gift of Rs.500 from the division has been expended on the reconstruction of this project.’ The logo of the Division had also been painted.
Such a large sign for a mere Rs. 500 donation? All right, this must have been in 1945 when the British wrested
However, two days later when I was on the
Indian expressions: In
Burmese food: Too Too restaurant, recommended by Lonely Planet for Burmese food, served a prawn curry dinner with 7 decent-sized courses, enough for two hogs. And all this for ky3300 (about Rs.200/ $3.50) Had I known the quantities would be so big I would not have gorged on that egg dosa (cooked by a Burmese). I left most of the courses behind without even tasting them.
But many courses seems to be a Burmese tradition. There is of course the main course—chicken, mutton, prawn, whatever. And a fairly large amount of rice, two-thirds of what I eat at home. (But then we Dewans are among the world’s champion eaters.) a soup, a salad with all kinds of non-traditional things. At Too Too these included raw lady fingers. Then there were all kinds of vegetables that I had never seen before. Apart from the quantity, one reason I left so much behind was that the vegetables had been cooked in a paste that was too thick for me. No, not chilli hot, but too strong. The main meal was very good, and that is what matters. But for a Dewan, before whom grown up buffets are reduced to fears of being insufficient, to leave things behind is a first. And that after intense physical exercise earlier that day: I had been up and down the tall Mandalay Hill.
It was the same at Nyaung U, except that the Yathar Gabar restaurant charged a mere ky 1500 (Rs.75/ $1.5) and added another two courses, including a delicious tomato salad. Very nutritious but I stuck to Chinese after that because many of the vegetarian courses were a bit too thick for me.
Billboards: Hoardings in
And then there was a beauty product called Naïve. In any case all girls who use a chemical thinking that it will improve on what God has given them are naïve.
‘Gas station:’ The next morning, it is 6.15 in the morning by the time I came down to the hotel’s reception. I was 15 minutes behind the target I had set for myself. The boat for Bagan was to leave at 7, and the distance to the jetty was said to be 30 minutes.
To make things worse, the hotel’s ‘moped taxi’ guy was not there. Panic! And to think that I had asked that nice moped guy who had yesterday taken me to the Mandalay Hill and around town, not to come this morning because I had wanted the hotel to be responsible for my getting up on time and for the punctuality of the moped taxi.
The hotel’s moped guy had to be woken up. He went to the basement, pushed the moped up, and we scooted. After a few miles suddenly he halted before a row of shacks.
‘Gas station,’ he explained.
My heart sank further: ‘I am going to miss the boat,’ I thought.
My moped guy banged on one of the tiny shacks. A guy inside woke up and opened the door from inside. After all, it was only 0630. My moped guy asked me for an advance (Ky 1000) on the fare (Ky 2500). He returned half a minute later with a mineral water bottle filled with some fuel, which he poured into his moped.
We were on the road again and in five minutes were at the jetty. Meaning that in the morning it takes only fifteen or twenty minutes from the 77th/
(The buses to Nyaung Shwe and back both halted at a gas station in pretty Kalaw. It was a proper station, with one pillar ? each for HSD and MS [motor spirit], with a pipe and a nozzle attached to each pillar. The station was better looking than the good petrol pumps of
(In this regard too post-sanction
Hyper-inflation: The Kyat had been reduced to less that 0.1¢ (4 paise). As in Sandinista
It was being hoped that the K5000 note would help curb the black market in petrol and diesel. I still don’t understand how.
So, obviously what I saw in
At the jetty: I apologised to the lady at the jetty because I thought I was late. (I wasn’t. there was still almost half an hour to go.) She was all smiles and courtesy—and totally laid back. And yet the cruiser, like yesterday’s bus from
Moral: You don’t need Lufthansa-style Teutonic grumpiness to be efficient—or punctual.
Professionally run hotels—and backpackers’ hostels: The other remarkable thing about
In some ways the isolation shows. Paris Bakery near Winner Inn in
After five, when it was no longer too hot, a youngish man with a long broom? went over the lawns of Golden Express, Nyaung U, slowly herding together the fallen autumn leaves and clearing each section meticulously. At Winner Inn,
Even the tiniest of hotels had clear cut shifts for their staff. These were no amateur mom-and-pop hotels run by a few retainers of the family. And the staff knew how to handle a whole range of situations.
Wake up calls were never late by a minute, and the guy would be gone before I could come out to tip him, both at GoldStar and at
On the Ayeyarwady (Irrawady) from Mandalay
One of the western tourists on the boat complained about the lack of scenery during the almost ten-hour boat ride on the Irrawady. True, it was not as green as the Sunderbans (
As for scenery I got more than I had hoped for. I had been told to expect a City of
And on the banks on the river there were women bathing with clothes on, leaving only the shoulders and calves uncovered, as they would in many parts of India—certainly the Jammu canal.
Drop down signs: Shortly after we got into the boat a man went through the aisles with a little, rolled up sign. The white sign was made of soft polythene, but its top and bottom had been wrapped around wooden rollers, like the heraldic scrolls that
This nice man would stand at the beginning of the aisle, release his fingers and the 15 inch sign would drop down immediately.
He obviously spoke little English. So, the sign told us where to get our breakfast and till what hour. We should have this in
For the first time I realised that the wooden rollers were not merely ornamental. The roller at the bottom made sure that the sign, be it on paper, cloth or, now, plastic, did not flutter in the wind. Besides, the weight of the lower roller made the sign drop down in a second. The upper roller was partly to hold on to but mainly to keep the sign flat, and not crumble.
When we reached the jetty at Old Bagan there was the same kind of sign again, but much wider and longer. It gave us the rates to be paid for trishaws and horse carts. A horse cart is like a small
Bagan (Nyaung U)
I create confusion: Lonely Planet described New Park Hotel on
The driver of horse cart took us to a very fancy resort called Thiripyitsaya which was right next to the jetty. That’s what comes out of half-baked knowledge.
Anyway he took us to the Golden Express. The British couple dropped off and I asked the driver to take me to
‘Very far,’ he said. Because I felt guilty about the diversion to the Thiripyitsaya resort (the diversion was hardly 500m. or so), I did not insist. I checked into the Golden Express and I am convinced that providence had led me here. True, it is 70% more expensive. It has a base rate of $17 for singles vs. $10 at
But Golden Express is spread over more than five or six acres, has a pool (which I was too pooped to use after climbing the Popa and cycling around Bagan) and, above all, great lawns on which they serve a big breakfast on elegantly laid out tables under umbrellas. This is the place for writing your journal.
A sweet people: I had planned to spend two nights in Bagan, so like an eager beaver I got down to sightseeing immediately after I checked in. I headed for the Shwezigon Paya. By now it was 6.30pm or so and already quite dark. The Paya was wonderfully lit from below. A very nice, mediæval covered passage, the sides of which are open, leads to it. Countless handicrafts shops have sprung up along this passage.
I started walking through this passage, meditating as I did so. Suddenly the lights went out, as happens very often in Bagan. There was enough light in the sky for me to see the path between the shops, but I decided to stop and finish my prayers while waiting for the lights to come back.
A teenaged boy, who worked for one of the shops, thought that I had stopped because I could not see. He lit the path with his torch. I didn’t need it but because he wouldn’t stop shining the torch till I reached the end of the beam I had to accept his very kind offer.
Would this happen in
Later that evening I decided to check out
I made a point to note the name of the restaurant. Even though I was planning to eat at a LP-recommended place, no prizes for guessing where I actually did. (Nutritious and plentiful as the food was the next two days I ate at the lp recommended
LP, of course, is the Guide Michelin for the small towns and villages of the
An early-bird wedding: The next morning I got up early, at 6 [actually closer to 630am,] because I had to go to
The medium-sized hall, with ‘gothic’ windows of the kind Kashmiris have started mistaking for Islamic, has a raised platform at one end, as in
Traffic in Bagan, and some other parts of
Power supply in Nyaung U is erratic, compared with
Local sweets: The Nyaung U market has a long section for absolutely delicious, if soaked in oil, local sweets. We were charged the same rates as the local people. A maal-poowa style pancake, with coconut strips, made in front of you, cost k100 (Rs.5/ 10c).
God micro-manages our lives: On Saturdays I never drink water (or eat) till I have watered a peepal tree. For the first time in 4 years I did not light a sweet oil lamp, because I left it behind in
If God wants you to worship Him He will create the means to make sure you do!
Cherry and the paradox of the English language in
The Shwesandaw, like other payas, has one entrance in each direction. It is shaped like a mini-Mexican/ Mayan pyramid, with stone steps from all four sides leading to the flat top. I chose the side that had been longest in the shade, so that the old feet did not get scalded.
A little girl, fifteen or sixteen, her cheeks, like those of most
When I returned she was into her zoology homework: parenchyma, the intestines of tapeworms, and stuff like that which all of us in
I offered to help her with her English. After all, it was only around 3.15. I had done all my sightseeing in Bagan by then:
Teaching this girl English was so much more ennobling. (As for parenchyma, it held as little fascination for me when I was in Class X as it does today.)
The girl said that her name was Cherry. I assumed that she called herself that because it was a ‘convenient’ name. (Rajan, a medical student whom I later met, explained that he used the name ‘Roger’ in his e-mail address ‘because Roger is more convenient.’) Like an idiot I persisted in asking for her ‘real’ Myanmarese name. Cherry is a very serious girl. She assumed that I thought she was lying. ‘Why should I lie?’ she insisted.
Later I noticed that Cherry was not an uncommon name in
Cherry had no one to tell her how to pronounce simple words like ‘decent,’ which she believed was dee-kent. All her biology lessons were in English. The essays she had written, in her very neat handwriting, in her homework notebook were in fairly grammatical English.
And yet, in Class X, at age fifteen or so, she had not understood the word ‘rough,’ leave alone ‘correspondence’ and ‘approximately,’ with which she had serious problems.
‘And what does ‘business-like manner’ mean? Does it mean that if a tourist says ‘No’ you don’t pester him after that?’
‘Yes, something like that,’ I assured her.
Many educated people in
The remarkable thing about shop signs and even most road signs in
In Bom, sorry, Mumbai, on the other hand you have to apologise for putting an English signboard on your shop. This was once true of many Central Indian cities, too.
On the other hand the level of English used in
The paradox continues into the media. Myanmar Times is a remarkably well- written, well-edited and well-produced weekly. The advertisements in MT, especially one for a tiger beer in which thousands of little men make up one beer bottle, are as good as the best in India.
But even upper middle class medical college students don’t speak English with half as much ease as their counterparts in an Indian town of that size would.
The answer to this paradox could be that on the one hand Myanmar has an English-speaking elite, but it is infinitely smaller—as a percentage—than its counterpart in India, Zambia or Sri Lanka.
To get back to Cherry Bagan, that being her full name. By now three other girls had gathered around her, including a fairly dark skinned girl whom Cherry introduced as her sister.
Now, in
So, like an idiot. I said things like, ‘You mean cousin, don’t you?’ ‘No.’ ‘You mean you have the same parents?’ ‘Yes.’
Cherry understood what I meant. ‘In our family we say she is an Indian.’ (That should teach a lesson to us racist Indians. In
The ‘Indian sister’ was even more serious than Cherry. Their glum—or should that be ‘grim’—faces spoke of an anxiety that was serious as well as current. The ‘Indian sister’ was perhaps also aware that her complexion was something of a minus on the looks sweepstakes.
The sister knew of Indian cinema’s superstar, Amitabh Bachchan. ‘Your films have a long of songs and dances. I saw some at an exhibition.’
Cherry was having trouble with the English sound ‘th,’ as in think. I tried to think of some
‘Who is the most famous person from
‘Suu Kyi’s father, Bogyoke Aung San,’ one of the girls said.
For a moment I was shaken. I steadied myself by recalling US press accounts of 198- according to which many youths knew one John Lennon as the father of the great Julian, singer of the super hit ---. So, the great Bogyoke Aung San, too, was now to be known as somebody’s father.
What was equally interesting was that despite the blackout of her name in the official newspapers and television, Daw Aung San (as the independent Myanmar Times referred to her in its headlines[x]) loomed enormously large in the imaginations of little girls in remote villages. (Cherry’s family, which uses the surname Bagan, lives close to the Shwesandaw temple.)
In any case I had meant U Thant, the longest serving Secretary General of the United Nations, because his name had a th in it.
‘But our teacher says his name is pronounced oo taint [soft t].’
‘Obviously the teacher was right. The Myanmarese, like Indian Tamilians, had assigned a different sound to th. No wonder many of them could not say ‘think’ the way the white Commonwealth and the
‘Where are you staying?’ Cherry asked me.
‘At the Golden Express Hotel.’
‘My friend got married there this morning.’
What a small world. Who needs to trace six degrees of separation when, in most cases, one is enough?
‘The girl sells clothes,’ Cherry said, rubbing two imaginary pieces of cloth together with her hands. ‘Her husband is a driver.’ Now she moved an imaginary steering wheel a little to each side.
How old were they?
‘The bride was 23 and the groom 25 or 26.’
I was impressed that what would be considered a lower middle-class couple anywhere could afford a smart venue like the Golden Express. This time I kept my thoughts to myself.
‘Weddings have become expensive,’ the ‘Indian’ sister informed me, as if reading my mind. ‘You have to spend at least $500.’
The company that I work for runs
‘At Golden Express they would have paid a little more,’ Cherry’s sister said.
Earlier, while learning English we had come across the difficult word ‘approximately.’
Q: How much do you earn?
Cherry answered, ‘Approximately K600 [Rs.30/ 60¢] a day.’
That was a fifth of the minimum wage in a poor country like
So, I complimented the girls for living in a low-cost economy. I rattled off a few examples. Cherry frowned. Obviously she did not agree but she said nothing.
‘In
In
However, when I got back to
In Mayangone township you could get a ‘cheap’ 3 bedroom house for K40 million ($40,000). The ‘plinth area’ was 1,000 square feet but the ‘compound’ was all of 1,500 sft. My second inquiry in the same area yielded a price tag of K45 million. And this was when, thanks to the Mayangone township, there was an ‘over-supply’ of built up houses in
Then there was this apartment, in a ten-storey complex in Bahan township. It had a ‘covered area’ of 1,350sft. and was sold for K105 million.
The rental market was no different. There was this truly nice single-storey house on
But while speaking to Cherry’s sister I did not know all this. E mail Cherry for sis name I only knew that Bagan was one place where you could still build a decent house for $2,000. So, once again I remarked about how cheap everything was in Bagan and
Now Cherry could take this conversation no more. She burst out, ‘What is cheap in
That explained the grim look on the faces of both sisters. Obviously someone in their family had needed hospitalisation.
Cherry’s bitterest words were for
And because she earned her money from tourists she kept in touch with them through e-mail. ‘I check my e-mail only once in two or three weeks. It costs money.’ Indeed, it does: at least K1,000 for an hour. That’s a lot of money for someone who earns K600 a day.
‘I no longer go to a free school,’ she said more than once. Apparently tuition is free till Class IX. After that students have to shift to private schools, where they charge $100 a year. (‘For nine months,’ Cherry corrected me.)
‘And that does not include uniforms,’ Cherry continued agitatedly. ‘Nor textbooks or stationery. And once in every few months they ask you for a donation for this or a donation for that.’ She was obviously very angry.
Be careful of what you wish for: The architecture at Bagan is not as elaborate as that at
Viewed from the top of the Shwesandaw Paya you can see almost all of the 4300+ temples. Bagan is one huge flat land with low grasses. The government has made a neat rectangular road in the centre. The narrow end of the rectangle is at most 1km wide. Therefore, all temples inside the rectangle are less than 500m. from the nearest road. Then there are temples to the left, right, above or below the rectangle, again rarely more than 750m. from a metalled road.
The fact that the temples of Bagan are made of bricks and baked clay—and not something ‘durable’ like stone—makes them not sharp and elegant, like slim Balinese (or Burmese?) dancers with their sharp, pointed, conical caps. How have these temples remained so fresh despite the passage of between eight hundred and a thousand years?
Cherry, the serenity of Bagan, the nice atmosphere of the raised garden at Golden Express, the swimming pool, the fact that I had not been to the archaeological museum all made me wish I could spend one extra day here—even though I knew I would not meet Cherry again.
Around 6pm when I went to the hotel’s counter to book my bus ticket for the next day’s journey to Thanggyi (for
As I said, be careful when you make a wish.
The next day was Sunday. The archaeological museum is closed on all Saturdays, Sundays (unusual!) and gazetted holidays! I did not meet Cherry. And the bones were too tired to swim. But me bones needed the Sabbath. I mean, climbing Mandalay Hill one day, getting up at 5 for the next two days, for the boat ride and for Mt Popa, climbing Popa in the morning, cycling around all of Bagan in the evening—and all in less time than LP or the hotel staff had said would take—all this is no mean feat even for a 19 year old.
Nyaung U to Nyaung Shwe
Meiktila has an
The
The Karens, who are [26%] of the population, are fast taking to Christianity. ‘At present they have no religion’ a young medico said. Not correct. Animism is not the same as ‘no religion.’
Myanmar Times has a ‘Socialite’ page—their Page 3. You will middle-aged Muslim women in headscarf-like clothes on this page.
Hinduism in
They, in turn, concluded that I was from
It was a Friday. When it was time for us to be served snacks the young man asked, ‘Is that vegetarian?’
Since he was diffident about his English, I decided to mediate with the stewardess, and assured them that it was.
‘I know how you feel,’ I said. ‘Outside
‘I am a vegetarian only on Fridays,’ the girl, whose name was Dr. Mona, said. The youth with her was her brother Rajan—who used the name Roger ‘for convenience.’ His Burmese name is Myothet Lwin.
‘Fridays?’ I asked incredulously. Surely the cult of Santoshi Ma does not extend to
‘I do it because of Santoshi Mata ji,’ Mona explained.
Obviously it did.
‘So what are you? Hindus or Buddhists?’ I asked.
‘Actually, we are both.’
As a part-time anthropologist I understood what they meant. They belonged to one of the many dual religion communities of
Mona explained that many of her friends who considered themselves only Buddhist would go to temples of Santoshi Mata ji and abstain from sour food on Fridays.
They also visited temples of other Hindu deities in
The educational degrees of the Myanmarese are the same as in
Kalaw is a very pretty hill station at 4356', with even taller hills, at least 1500' taller, above it. Kalaw and Nyaung Shwe have a small Sikh population. Their faces have got rounded, obviously through inter-marriage. They don’t speak any Indian language and are called Bengalis here, because they came through
Nyaung Shwe (Inlé lake)
Levels of integrity and trust out here still seem to be in the no locks, total trust era. I went to the bicycle hire near Hotel GoldStar. He said he wouldn’t be up at 7 or 8 the next morning, so he advised me to take the bicycle right then, and keep it at the hotel ‘locked or unlocked.’ I offered him a deposit. He wouldn’t take one. ‘As long as you don’t take it [the bicycle] to your country!’
Nyaung Shwe is a very nice little town. Its monasteries are big and beautiful. Most of them are in the
For a tiny town—a big village, really, it has nice institutions like The Pancake Kingdom (Tired of rice? Try our pancakes). So professionally run, apart from being tasty, western-style pancakes. Its polite English speaking owners and staff packed them in nice thermocol ‘tiffins’, just as Bagan’s Golden Express people had my breakfast. (Golden Express even gave me a 250ml or ½ litre of juice for the journey. Touch ho
Viewpoint restaurant, on the other hand, is a posh place with an attitude. It is a long covered first floor verandah in a wooden pagoda on the lake’s bank, with an identical, large, reception space below. Its prices—around k7000 a meal—are almost six times those of Nyaung Shwe’s cheaper places. But what is that in rupees or dollars? Less than Rs400/ $8. in
Not enough time for Inle? Because of that extra day at Bagan—and because I was alone I had no incentive to linger on at Inle for another day—I wanted to go back to
Aquarius Inn had been my first choice, because LP had recommended it. and with good reason. Its urbane, bespectacled owner was water his considerable plants when I went there. Even though I was not staying with him he spent enormous time advising me on how to salvage things. Go to Khaung Daing by bicycle (1 hour), take the boat across the lake to Mine Thouk (30 minutes), cycle back to Nyaung Shwe (1½ hours). 3 hours seemed reasonable. I had to be at the Shwe Shyaung? crossing by 1 or 1.15, so even if I left Nyaung Shwe by 12noon I was safe. Or, even if I left by 7 (in the event I left the guest house at 8.15), I’d be okay/
And that is what I did. Bus no. 11, Al Hamd ul Illah, was working as well as it ever had in my life. I made it from Viewpoint restaurant to the Kaung Daing jetty in 45 minutes. The boat ride was just under 30 minutes. Got a fair idea of the lake. My grouse: I had to pay K6000 for that ride\ alone, whereas for K13000 a group of us could have had the motorboat to ourselves for the whole day. But that’s the pitfall of being single, From the Mine Thouk jetty it was faster still. Leave alone an hour and a half, I was back on the outskirts of Nyaung Shwe by 1050 or so, i.e. in less than an hour. After that I cycled about that pretty little town.
My biggest fear during the ride was a flat tyre. That could have made me miss my bus to
At Mine (pron, mine, main!) Thouk I bought a bunch of little bananas for K250 (25c/ Rs12.50). With prices like those who wants to haggle? I put them in the ‘basket’ in front of the bicycle, with my bottle of water and LP. The bottle kept acting as a lever and tossing the book up. This hadn’t happened before the bananas got in. now the bananas started getting mashed, so I had no choice but to keep stopping each time a new banana got mashed and eat it up. I did not want to eat them all because I had a 15 hour (LP had said 16-20 hour) bus journey ahead of me and, you can imagine why I didn’t want a stomach full of 15 bananas. In the event, I had to eat all the bananas by the time I got to my guest house and, no, they did not create the problem I had dreaded.
But my LP’s cover and sides got drenched in mashed banana paste.
The long bicycle rides at Bagan and in the Inle area made me thank God for the excellent speed I was able to do: and to think that the last time I rode a bicycle at all was in Lakshadweep in 1999 and the only time in my life I rode bicycle to work or school was at Cambridge, 1987.
Breakfast at GoldStar was from 6 to 9. Today being Tuesday, I asked them to make me a vegetarian breakfast at 7am. I reached at 8 instead, by when they had exhausted their vegetarian noodles. No problem. Have it on your return from the lake, they told me. Suited me, because I wasn’t hungry. And when it came it was delicious. I suspect they used a factory-made ‘tastemaker.’ So what?
My ideas for the Lake—and for
Back to Yangon
I wanted to keep a two day cushion in
[i] New Light of
[ii] MT, 19-25 October, 2009
[iii] MT, 9-15 November, 2009.
[iv] MT, 2-8 November, 2009.
[v] MT, 2-8 November, 2009.
[vi] MT, 2-8 November, 2009.
[vii] MT, 2-8 November, 2009.
[viii] MT, 16-22 November, 2009.
[ix] MT, 16-22 November, 2009.
[x] MT, Sept 28-Oct 4, 2009
[MSOffice1]Morning star in
