Daw Phyu was not impressed by blogging when it first appeared. She also did not like chatting when internet chartrooms first appeared decades ago. She did not like to share her innermost thoughts with strangers; at the same time, she did not want to talk about others too. She was, of course, aware of the power of the Internet when she was introduced to Janet for sending and receiving articles for two very serious magazines that she worked on in mid 1990. However, for the next two decades, she was dismayed to witness many abuses of the Internet for propaganda, false information and bullying. Digital divides among people and among nations worsened the situation for decades. The worst crime was that SOME self-seeking, dim-witted twits _ endowed with generous grants from well-meaning liberal-minded institutions _ have been allowed to rewrite or distort SOME histories and preach millions of the gullible and the equally stupid. They were/are as bad as spin-doctors from despotic regimes.
However, millions others are now fully enjoying digital renaissance. Ordinary people from almost all corners of this world are now allowed to do what the privileged few have been doing for decades. More and more people are talking about themselves and about others. Daw Phyu is happy to see so many truly intelligent and wise bloggers as well as commentators, especially from her old country and beyond. There are not only sponsored voices on the Internet. Many with divided opinions are discussing political, social and economic issues noisily and openly among themselves. The others are presenting the world whatever research they are working on; it is no longer the priority for many students to collect or buy just degrees or diplomas. This is the time to share others with how much they actually know. Many students are actually learning. Daw Phyu who is an ex-teacher, is full of joy. And many old and young people are also expressing whatever they like freely and openly. The Internet is truly coming of age.
Readers are now allowed to send online comments with a lightening speed on almost all what they have read on the Internet. A false report about the fall of a city in a conflict zone will be rebutted immediately by a resident in the area with a smartphone. If this false report is repeated several times, the credibility and the integrity of its source will be damaged beyond repairs. Now the power of the Internet is truly in the hands of ordinary decent folks, most of whom were silent for years. The source, no matter how powerful it is or how much it is protected, cannot erase its unprofessionalism and deviousness forever; some readers may already have printed its false report before its deletion; digital footprints are also stored in several servers all over the world. If any false report causes an escalation of a conflict resulting in massive loss of life and properties, people now understand that the source is guilty of the crime against humanity as much as rival warlords. The only way to restore the source's integrity is to apologise the readers at least A HUNDRED TIMES for its professional foul _ in THE LARGEST PRINT for at least a month to prevent further bloodshed and to remove these reports from the brains of infected readers or viewers. It is also recommended that those who are responsible for this internet media weapon of mass destruction be removed from office for good.
Despite her harsh recommendations, Daw Phyu fully promotes freedom of speech on the Internet. Daw Phyu no longer fears mass-brainwashing from all sides. She does not like to see the deletion or censorship of some comments on some media sites or YouTube sites. Some are worried that these comments will incite hatred or violence. What are the criteria to assess which comment is to be deleted and which is to be allowed? It is OK to show the same footage of causalities in a conflict _ hundreds of times within a few days, possibly resulting in a further vicious circle of extreme violence among divided peoples; at the same time, some comments should not be allowed while some are as long as they are NOT made public.
There should not be any censorship on the Internet. Any attempt to whitewash or coverup false reports or images when its duplicity is made public or to snub out true reports should not be encouraged. At the same time, do not police the others while you cannot police yourself! You may commit professional fouls as many as you wish if you are not ethical enough. This will allow the public to see what you really are. Let the public see what others are like too. So do not delete false images and false reports uploaded by dimwits and the devious. The increasingly media-smart public have the right to see warts and all (of you as well as of them)!
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Friday, 17 December 2010
A robot
The nature of Daw Phyu's work (even as a casual worker) does not allow her and all her colleagues to express their opinions or to take sides of the hugely fragmented world. It may even be a criminal offence if she and her colleagues are directly or indirectly linked with any unlawful organisation acting under the disguise of a media organisation or a kind of campaigning group.
She has been acting like a robot for nearly two decades. However, this robot is not completely passive like a mindless hoover. Its memory chip has been silently storing massive amount of data for years. It is burdened with data deliberately fed for conversion which is its main function. For effective future conversion, its overactive neural network has also been relentlessly searching for new data and sources in all the veins and arteries of this planet. Moreover, it has been quietly processing complicated calculations and analysis on these data just to amuse itself.
However, this robot is NOT designed to delete old data or new irrelevant data like coughing up rotten mucus from painful overworked lungs. It is ALSO not allowed to let anyone to retrieve these raw data or to admire its analysis or calculations. So, it is just patiently waiting for the day when it will be relieved of this huge burden of being omniscient but not being allowed to be omnipotent. That will be the day when the robot dies naturally or be allowed to become a human without any concern or restrictions.
Unfortunately, for the last two years, this robot has also been detecting defects of some newly recruited "robots" and some of their "sellers or providers". Some of these "robots" break all rules in the books and their defective systems are allowed unlawfully. So the neural network of this carbon-based robot with this new kind of toxic data is dangerously overheating.
She has been acting like a robot for nearly two decades. However, this robot is not completely passive like a mindless hoover. Its memory chip has been silently storing massive amount of data for years. It is burdened with data deliberately fed for conversion which is its main function. For effective future conversion, its overactive neural network has also been relentlessly searching for new data and sources in all the veins and arteries of this planet. Moreover, it has been quietly processing complicated calculations and analysis on these data just to amuse itself.
However, this robot is NOT designed to delete old data or new irrelevant data like coughing up rotten mucus from painful overworked lungs. It is ALSO not allowed to let anyone to retrieve these raw data or to admire its analysis or calculations. So, it is just patiently waiting for the day when it will be relieved of this huge burden of being omniscient but not being allowed to be omnipotent. That will be the day when the robot dies naturally or be allowed to become a human without any concern or restrictions.
Unfortunately, for the last two years, this robot has also been detecting defects of some newly recruited "robots" and some of their "sellers or providers". Some of these "robots" break all rules in the books and their defective systems are allowed unlawfully. So the neural network of this carbon-based robot with this new kind of toxic data is dangerously overheating.
Saturday, 4 December 2010
Enigma of History
Daw Phyu lost her voice ten days ago. She could not talk to friends on Skype or Google for she had to rest her vocal cords. The persistent cough and acute pain in her lungs were irritating. She could not sleep. She could not read. And she could not watch even television. She fell asleep or probably "lost consciousness" during short periods of respite from coughs and pain before television documentaries finished.
Fortunately, the pain eased slightly last night. And she was coughing less. Yet she could not still speak; and she should not go out in this cold weather. So on Saturday morning, she started watching all BBC documentaries that she missed for the last three weeks.
The first series that she watched was "Ancient Worlds" by Richard Miles. She had already watched the first programme and another unrelated program titled the Delphi. So she needed to catch up the next three programmes by Richard Miles. And these programmes were broadcast at the right time for Daw Phyu who explored Greek archeological sites only a year earlier.
To her delight, the riddle of the Phoenician disappearance was solved by this documentary. Since she was very young, she wondered what had happened to these people. All the books she read many years ago could not give plausible accounts about the "disappearance" these once hugely successful maritime entrepreneurs; maybe Daw Phyu must have missed very good history books. She was also delighted to have been reacquainted with the history of Assyrians, Persians, ancient Greeks, Egyptians and the Jewish people. {WATCH THIS DOCUMENTARY, IF YOU ALSO WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS}
Then she started watching documentaries under the current BBC German season. Daw Phyu felt like as if she had hit the jackpot twice. On the same day, she discovered another great enigma of Frederick the Great! Oh! yes, he was not just the head of the German-Prussian military machine that inspired Hitler and his Third Reich, but also a philosopher king who was a patron of culture and free thinkers. It was also a delight to see historical places in Germany that she visited only a few years earlier. She never went to places like France, Germany or Greece for idle shopping. She had to be there to walk where historical figures had walked and breathed! {WATCH THIS DOCUMENTARY, IF YOU ALSO WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE ENIGMA OF FG}
History has been rewritten again and again by winners and thugs (and also by brave academics or champions of the truth). Ancient historical figures, their writings and monuments were defaced, destroyed and resurrected again and again in Europe, in ancient Egypt and in other parts of the world. Whatever has been defaced will be reconstructed and rebuilt. Whatever has been destroyed will also be resurrected. Whatever has been lost can be found again. So Daw Phyu is quite optimistic today about the enigmatic history of the lost worlds.
Fortunately, the pain eased slightly last night. And she was coughing less. Yet she could not still speak; and she should not go out in this cold weather. So on Saturday morning, she started watching all BBC documentaries that she missed for the last three weeks.
The first series that she watched was "Ancient Worlds" by Richard Miles. She had already watched the first programme and another unrelated program titled the Delphi. So she needed to catch up the next three programmes by Richard Miles. And these programmes were broadcast at the right time for Daw Phyu who explored Greek archeological sites only a year earlier.
To her delight, the riddle of the Phoenician disappearance was solved by this documentary. Since she was very young, she wondered what had happened to these people. All the books she read many years ago could not give plausible accounts about the "disappearance" these once hugely successful maritime entrepreneurs; maybe Daw Phyu must have missed very good history books. She was also delighted to have been reacquainted with the history of Assyrians, Persians, ancient Greeks, Egyptians and the Jewish people. {WATCH THIS DOCUMENTARY, IF YOU ALSO WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS}
Then she started watching documentaries under the current BBC German season. Daw Phyu felt like as if she had hit the jackpot twice. On the same day, she discovered another great enigma of Frederick the Great! Oh! yes, he was not just the head of the German-Prussian military machine that inspired Hitler and his Third Reich, but also a philosopher king who was a patron of culture and free thinkers. It was also a delight to see historical places in Germany that she visited only a few years earlier. She never went to places like France, Germany or Greece for idle shopping. She had to be there to walk where historical figures had walked and breathed! {WATCH THIS DOCUMENTARY, IF YOU ALSO WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE ENIGMA OF FG}
History has been rewritten again and again by winners and thugs (and also by brave academics or champions of the truth). Ancient historical figures, their writings and monuments were defaced, destroyed and resurrected again and again in Europe, in ancient Egypt and in other parts of the world. Whatever has been defaced will be reconstructed and rebuilt. Whatever has been destroyed will also be resurrected. Whatever has been lost can be found again. So Daw Phyu is quite optimistic today about the enigmatic history of the lost worlds.
Sunday, 28 November 2010
Science Fiction
I finished reading my first science fiction only a week ago. It is Faster than Light by John Lucas and published in 2002. After reading a few chapters, I was so impressed by the author that I looked for his name on the Internet. I could not find the author on the Internet for two days. However, I did not give up. Eventually, the clever Internet learnt what I was repeatedly asking for; it finally gave up the details of the writer. As I have expected, he is a Cambridge maths graduate. That is why, this novel is that damned good! He knows the stuff he has written. Why has he not written his second novel? He is still young and he should keep on writing more books. Yes, of course, his book is not for someone who has little interest in economic theories, social theories, maths, physics, western philosophy and so on. Still then, if you regularly watch Dr. Who, it may not be that difficult.
I picked up this book on the dump in my tower block along with a number of other science fiction novels. Somebody must have just died and relatives just got rid of the departed's precious collection.
Science fiction was always a mystery to me. Yet I like watching science documentaries including lectures on particle physics or astrophysics or maths. Still then, I never thought of reading science fiction novels until recently. I have studied English literature and linguistics at the University and science fiction was not included in my curriculum. Crime fiction was not included either. I did not read crime fiction until I discovered P.D.James just as John Lucas is inviting me now to the mysterious world of science fiction.
In Burma, I did watch Hollywood blockbusters like Superman and liked them for special effects but did not treat them seriously. They were just fun and nothing more.
In 1985 at Aberdeen University, I watched an episode of Star Trek series in a student common room. It was about Time Travel and the crew were transported to the world of Greek Gods. At that time, I could still not accept fantasy in fiction and films as a serious genre. I thought it was another time-wasting stupid series and did not watch Star Trek until I came back to the UK in 1989. Only after I had watched science documentaries for many years, I appreciated these films and other television series. Still then I was not ready for science fiction or fantasy. To me, good novels must be about social realism.
A few years ago, I started watching Dr. Who. Although I dislike the characters of Dr. Who and his irritating sidekicks who are too juvenile for my taste, I realise that complex science theories and hypothesis are explained through plots to children and dumb people like me. I remember The Eagle Comic my father subscribed to in the fifties and sixties. My father used to translate Dan Dare to us. Now I understand why my father, an electronic technician, loved this comic so much.
You must love and understand something about science in order to appreciate science comic and television series like Dan Dare and Dr. Who. However, special effects and fantastic plots with flirtatious female and male eye candies prevent many from being intimidated by complex philosophical and scientific ideas. In 2007, I told my ex-teacher of English literature that I was watching Dr. Who. He asked me whether the ideas in this series were about the truth and I told him that they were. It was the wrong answer which will probably stop him from watching this series forever. More than a couple of decades ago, I excitedly learnt about the possible existence of black holes in the universe. Now the Hubble Telescope and other telescopes have proved their existence beyond doubt. Sometimes, we may not understand some complex theories in a novel or in a film; that does not make this novel or this film a bad one.
Fortunately, I have discovered John Lucas before I die. Sadly for many, this is not the case.
I picked up this book on the dump in my tower block along with a number of other science fiction novels. Somebody must have just died and relatives just got rid of the departed's precious collection.
Science fiction was always a mystery to me. Yet I like watching science documentaries including lectures on particle physics or astrophysics or maths. Still then, I never thought of reading science fiction novels until recently. I have studied English literature and linguistics at the University and science fiction was not included in my curriculum. Crime fiction was not included either. I did not read crime fiction until I discovered P.D.James just as John Lucas is inviting me now to the mysterious world of science fiction.
In Burma, I did watch Hollywood blockbusters like Superman and liked them for special effects but did not treat them seriously. They were just fun and nothing more.
In 1985 at Aberdeen University, I watched an episode of Star Trek series in a student common room. It was about Time Travel and the crew were transported to the world of Greek Gods. At that time, I could still not accept fantasy in fiction and films as a serious genre. I thought it was another time-wasting stupid series and did not watch Star Trek until I came back to the UK in 1989. Only after I had watched science documentaries for many years, I appreciated these films and other television series. Still then I was not ready for science fiction or fantasy. To me, good novels must be about social realism.
A few years ago, I started watching Dr. Who. Although I dislike the characters of Dr. Who and his irritating sidekicks who are too juvenile for my taste, I realise that complex science theories and hypothesis are explained through plots to children and dumb people like me. I remember The Eagle Comic my father subscribed to in the fifties and sixties. My father used to translate Dan Dare to us. Now I understand why my father, an electronic technician, loved this comic so much.
You must love and understand something about science in order to appreciate science comic and television series like Dan Dare and Dr. Who. However, special effects and fantastic plots with flirtatious female and male eye candies prevent many from being intimidated by complex philosophical and scientific ideas. In 2007, I told my ex-teacher of English literature that I was watching Dr. Who. He asked me whether the ideas in this series were about the truth and I told him that they were. It was the wrong answer which will probably stop him from watching this series forever. More than a couple of decades ago, I excitedly learnt about the possible existence of black holes in the universe. Now the Hubble Telescope and other telescopes have proved their existence beyond doubt. Sometimes, we may not understand some complex theories in a novel or in a film; that does not make this novel or this film a bad one.
Fortunately, I have discovered John Lucas before I die. Sadly for many, this is not the case.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Changing Tides
In 1996, I designed my first free commercial webpage on my PC. It was primitive but served its purposes. I called it MaSabe Translation Service. Then I bought a proper domain (amarapura.com), a commercial web-hosting service and several domain names from a Microsoft-sponsored Active ISP in 1998/9. However, I stopped my yearly subscription for this mature website in 2003 when I was locked out for two years after the ISP disappeared on the Microsoft site. My first commercial website had been listed free everywhere by the generous Google. I grieved for the demise of this commercially mature website for months.
In 2005, I bought a new domain name from Yahoo Business Hosting Service. My old domain "amarapura.com" had been already taken by someone. So I had to get a new domain. My new site was built and maintained on a PC with Yahoo SiteBuilder.
Then last year, I bought a MacBookPro because its brightly-backlit screen is perfect for my poor eyesight. Unfortunately, Yahoo SiteBuilder is not compatible with this Mac. And also to my utter disappointment, I could afford only MS Office Suite and FileMaker Pro 10 for this machine. I kept on going to the Apple Store in Regent Street, crazily gazing at the display of expensive professional multimedia and web-authoring software, safely tucked up on top shelves. Worried security guards appeared suddenly beside me every time I did that.
Today I discovered a free Mac compatible web-authoring software for my current Yahoo website. I must also use this software with Firefox browser. Unfortunately, all the contents on my exiting site are now gone after the installation. Now I have to start building a whole new website from scratch again.
Now I am reflecting on the last two decades of my life in the United Kingdom. Twenty years ago, I was filled with excitement about the new technology as well as regret for not going to a computer class six year earlier (1984) when my first advisor wanted me to analyse the syntactic structure of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway at the Aberdeen University. I thought I had already missed a great opportunity when I touched a personal computer for the first time in my life in April 1990.
Introduction to PCs and Apple Computers (1990-1996)
I was introduced to Apple computers at a semi-publishing house of an educational/animal charity in June 1990. The new Director requested help from a poorly-equipped college where I was busy messing around with a SAGE accounting software, a spreadsheet and dBase 4 on primitive PCs. I was sent to a college by a government job advisor. I spent most of my time in the computer room than in the lecture room. Most students liked to learn only bookkeeping from a lecturer but not "typing" in a computer room. Later they liked to learn to use SAGE. Unlike them, PC Dos and MS Dos along with DBase 4 and a spreadsheet programme became my obsession very quickly. WordStar was the leading word-processing software at that time. There was a less known program called Word on college computers.
The ambitious Director from an animal charity said she wanted a student who already knew businesses and had sufficient IT skills. She said that she had no time to train anyone. The college chose me for this lady! On my first day at work, I was given the whole library of manuals for Apple computers. First I was terrified to see a mouse on her red mousepad. She told me get on with the mouse by playing a game for fifteen minutes and left the room. I surprised myself that I could tame this terrifying mouse within a few minutes. I took manuals on 4th Dimension and Excel home in the evening and devoured them the whole night.
From the second day, I had to set up 4th Dimension relational database files from scratch for several types of membership records. Within a week, I was using Microsoft Excel to start computerising the whole paper-based but meticulously-kept financial system. Later I was asked to design two quarterly magazines with PageMaker 3 and later PageMaker 4.
At work, I was also allowed to use the black screen of Janet (Internet) to communicate with other computers all over the world. I was told we were using the internet illegally! Apple machines were wonderful; however, I was not allowed to mess around with them because they were under expensive service contracts. I missed PCs and MS DOS at the college. I knew Microsoft would take over the world because it allowed us to do whatever we liked on its system from the beginning.
My First Computer, Amstrad (1990)
Then I decided to buy a computer in July 1990. I had already saved about £600. The Director tried to sell me her laptop which she had bought for more than £1000 some months ago. I looked at her laptop and was disappointed with the specification. I wanted a desktop with more storage and speed. Then I made a weird decision which I later regretted a little bit. I bought an Amstrad instead of a PC. I paid £1300 for this mysterious machine on instalment; I had to pay back the loan for one year. I was curious about a different system with different software. This Alan Sugar's baby was tough; it never crashed. However, it was not as exciting as old PCs at the college. I used this computer for word-processing only before dumping it on a friend who happily paid me £150.00 for this £1300 machine a few years later. I still feel guilty about selling this to my friend who knew nothing about computing. After this transaction, I never sold my old computers to anyone. Now I only want to find freeloaders for a free dumping ground.
At the end of 1990, I left the animal charity to the annoyance of the Director, trying to get into Brunel University to do a Master Degree in Artificial Intelligence. She threatened to report to the government employment service for not accepting her job. However, I took the risk and left because I had to think about two staff members at the charity. They were worried sick about losing their jobs if I stayed. The other reason I left the charity was that I was not interested in filling in daily digital deliveries into the complex of storage for the rest of my life. I rather build more storage systems with different complexity.
In August 1991, I received a full-funded place for the University course that I had applied. At the same time, I was offered a desk-end job from a director from the largest international NGOs. When I told her about my plan to go back to the University and turned down the job offer gently, she screamed at me that I was too selfish to work for the mankind. Her shocking scream made me reluctantly accept the job because I did not want to be labelled as a selfish person.
The Rise of Microsoft and PCs
The University Computer department wished me good luck with this job when they heard about this! The only consolation for this miserable job (filling in daily deliveries into a warehouse that someone else had built) was that there were PCs, an intranet and Informix 4GL database at work. And I sometimes had to write summaries out of long documents. And also with the merge salary, I could afford to buy the most powerful custom-built PC with Windows 3.11 within a few months. I had been living like a forest-dwelling monk. I did not care about my cheap clothes and appearance. In 1994 I had my first internet CompuServe account at home. I was also thrilled to have RealNetwork music player for the first time on my home computer and to watch videos on the internet in 1995. And I bought only one item from Harrods in my whole life; that was Windows 95 on the first day of its launch. I had to get it many years before anyone at work had it on their office computers! I used my lunch break only once to go to Harrods which was near the office. Unsurprisingly, my unusual lunch break and my purchase caused so much commotion among office "girls" during the rest of the day.
The Rise and Rise of the Internet
In August 1995 I left this international charity organisation. In 1996 I did a computer programming course at the Middlesex University. However, the courses were dumped down within a month at the request of most students who were only interested in the Internet rather than Machine Language or C++. The university used Apple computers. Students made films using Multimedia Director software and 3 D modelling software. We were introduced to making videos and digital manipulation. To do my projects at home, I bought an Apple computer and a scanner. However, it was a low-end computer. The software were beyond our means. Students were using pirated copies of softwares even on their own PC computers at home.
A few years later, I dumped this Apple computer on my sister in Burma and bought another powerful custom-built PC (with a self-installed CD rewritable Drive) which I used until 1998 when it was replaced with a more powerful one (with a DVD rewritable Drive) which passed away in 2006. My Desktop Era ended in 2006.
The Rise of Laptops and netbooks! (2002 -
I bought my first Compaq laptop in 2002 but WindowXP and OfficeXP disabled it for the next four years. I was inflicted with frequent temporary paralysis in legs for the next four years and was busy repairing my own malfunctioned carbon-based hardware, chips and operating system. So, I just left my Compaq laptop in its original box while the old desktop was still alive. Only in 2006 after the death of my Carreria desktop, I spent several days to download all service packages and security patches to fix all XPs on this four year old unused laptop. I needed this as a home-based computer. This 2002 computer with outdated software was already ancient in 2006. So in the same year, I bought a new Dell laptop for use during my travels. My old 2002 Compaq became the server for my BT Broadband at home. Then I also bought a cheap secondhand IBM laptop as a spare. This IBM laptop died a few months later. Because there was no guarantee for a secondhand computer, I just buried it temporarily in a box so that I could perform a postmortem later.
I was quickly disappointed with the new Dell laptop. Its screen is badly-lit. I cannot see the screen under a bright light. So I needed to buy a small laptop with a brightly backlit screen. Initially, I did not want to buy an AppleMac because I could not afford its expensive software. However, I eventually dug deep into my empty wallet to get a MacBookPro in 2009 with FileMaker Pro 10 and MS Office Suite.
I have been using my Mac most of the time to browse the Internet, to write blogs and to work on FileMaker Pro 10 databases. However, I cannot update my Yahoo Business website on my Mac with my old software on my PC laptop. Only earlier today I discovered a free compatible web-authoring software to be used with the Firefox browser on my Mac.
Yes I love my MacBook Pro. It is sleek, unique and chic. It is beautiful, wonderful and powerful. However, I cannot afford Dreamweaver Suites, Acrobat Studios and other high-end graphic software.
And I lost the whole contents of my old website designed and built on PCs when it was updated on my Mac. I have not tested this new Mac web-authoring software that whether it is also compatible with Microsoft OS on PC laptops. Sometimes I like to work on my Dell and sometimes I like work on my Mac. However, life is never simple between AppleMac OS and Microsoft OS. Why can't professional Mac softwares be a lot cheaper for the mankind?
The Rise of Digital Books, IPad and Touch Tablets (2009 -
I bought an Ilex Iliad digital book in early 2009. The internal storage was full after I had purchased 10 language and specialists' dictionaries for my work. So I had to download thousands of free books on external storage media: SD cards, MMCards and USB sticks which I always carry in my handbag. The whole package cost me more than £1000. However, this device stopped working properly a year later_ annoyingly just after its guarantee expired. It was such a disappointment to me. However, all these storage media filled with thousands of books are still useful with my MacBookPro. When IPad came out, I became cautious for the first time. It is gorgeous. And it has colour. The screen is incomparable. However, the storage specification and the internet connection options are not satisfactory to me at least. Within a year, several rival products with better specification have appeared in the market. I am still waiting. So far, my MacBook Pro is my digital book. I use it to read newspapers, books and whatever is on the net. I use it to watch television, videos and films. And I can do whatever I want on this machine. Still then,... Can we have cheaper professional graphic and web-authoring Mac applications for the mankind?
In 2005, I bought a new domain name from Yahoo Business Hosting Service. My old domain "amarapura.com" had been already taken by someone. So I had to get a new domain. My new site was built and maintained on a PC with Yahoo SiteBuilder.
Then last year, I bought a MacBookPro because its brightly-backlit screen is perfect for my poor eyesight. Unfortunately, Yahoo SiteBuilder is not compatible with this Mac. And also to my utter disappointment, I could afford only MS Office Suite and FileMaker Pro 10 for this machine. I kept on going to the Apple Store in Regent Street, crazily gazing at the display of expensive professional multimedia and web-authoring software, safely tucked up on top shelves. Worried security guards appeared suddenly beside me every time I did that.
Today I discovered a free Mac compatible web-authoring software for my current Yahoo website. I must also use this software with Firefox browser. Unfortunately, all the contents on my exiting site are now gone after the installation. Now I have to start building a whole new website from scratch again.
Now I am reflecting on the last two decades of my life in the United Kingdom. Twenty years ago, I was filled with excitement about the new technology as well as regret for not going to a computer class six year earlier (1984) when my first advisor wanted me to analyse the syntactic structure of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway at the Aberdeen University. I thought I had already missed a great opportunity when I touched a personal computer for the first time in my life in April 1990.
Introduction to PCs and Apple Computers (1990-1996)
I was introduced to Apple computers at a semi-publishing house of an educational/animal charity in June 1990. The new Director requested help from a poorly-equipped college where I was busy messing around with a SAGE accounting software, a spreadsheet and dBase 4 on primitive PCs. I was sent to a college by a government job advisor. I spent most of my time in the computer room than in the lecture room. Most students liked to learn only bookkeeping from a lecturer but not "typing" in a computer room. Later they liked to learn to use SAGE. Unlike them, PC Dos and MS Dos along with DBase 4 and a spreadsheet programme became my obsession very quickly. WordStar was the leading word-processing software at that time. There was a less known program called Word on college computers.
The ambitious Director from an animal charity said she wanted a student who already knew businesses and had sufficient IT skills. She said that she had no time to train anyone. The college chose me for this lady! On my first day at work, I was given the whole library of manuals for Apple computers. First I was terrified to see a mouse on her red mousepad. She told me get on with the mouse by playing a game for fifteen minutes and left the room. I surprised myself that I could tame this terrifying mouse within a few minutes. I took manuals on 4th Dimension and Excel home in the evening and devoured them the whole night.
From the second day, I had to set up 4th Dimension relational database files from scratch for several types of membership records. Within a week, I was using Microsoft Excel to start computerising the whole paper-based but meticulously-kept financial system. Later I was asked to design two quarterly magazines with PageMaker 3 and later PageMaker 4.
At work, I was also allowed to use the black screen of Janet (Internet) to communicate with other computers all over the world. I was told we were using the internet illegally! Apple machines were wonderful; however, I was not allowed to mess around with them because they were under expensive service contracts. I missed PCs and MS DOS at the college. I knew Microsoft would take over the world because it allowed us to do whatever we liked on its system from the beginning.
My First Computer, Amstrad (1990)
Then I decided to buy a computer in July 1990. I had already saved about £600. The Director tried to sell me her laptop which she had bought for more than £1000 some months ago. I looked at her laptop and was disappointed with the specification. I wanted a desktop with more storage and speed. Then I made a weird decision which I later regretted a little bit. I bought an Amstrad instead of a PC. I paid £1300 for this mysterious machine on instalment; I had to pay back the loan for one year. I was curious about a different system with different software. This Alan Sugar's baby was tough; it never crashed. However, it was not as exciting as old PCs at the college. I used this computer for word-processing only before dumping it on a friend who happily paid me £150.00 for this £1300 machine a few years later. I still feel guilty about selling this to my friend who knew nothing about computing. After this transaction, I never sold my old computers to anyone. Now I only want to find freeloaders for a free dumping ground.
At the end of 1990, I left the animal charity to the annoyance of the Director, trying to get into Brunel University to do a Master Degree in Artificial Intelligence. She threatened to report to the government employment service for not accepting her job. However, I took the risk and left because I had to think about two staff members at the charity. They were worried sick about losing their jobs if I stayed. The other reason I left the charity was that I was not interested in filling in daily digital deliveries into the complex of storage for the rest of my life. I rather build more storage systems with different complexity.
In August 1991, I received a full-funded place for the University course that I had applied. At the same time, I was offered a desk-end job from a director from the largest international NGOs. When I told her about my plan to go back to the University and turned down the job offer gently, she screamed at me that I was too selfish to work for the mankind. Her shocking scream made me reluctantly accept the job because I did not want to be labelled as a selfish person.
The Rise of Microsoft and PCs
The University Computer department wished me good luck with this job when they heard about this! The only consolation for this miserable job (filling in daily deliveries into a warehouse that someone else had built) was that there were PCs, an intranet and Informix 4GL database at work. And I sometimes had to write summaries out of long documents. And also with the merge salary, I could afford to buy the most powerful custom-built PC with Windows 3.11 within a few months. I had been living like a forest-dwelling monk. I did not care about my cheap clothes and appearance. In 1994 I had my first internet CompuServe account at home. I was also thrilled to have RealNetwork music player for the first time on my home computer and to watch videos on the internet in 1995. And I bought only one item from Harrods in my whole life; that was Windows 95 on the first day of its launch. I had to get it many years before anyone at work had it on their office computers! I used my lunch break only once to go to Harrods which was near the office. Unsurprisingly, my unusual lunch break and my purchase caused so much commotion among office "girls" during the rest of the day.
The Rise and Rise of the Internet
In August 1995 I left this international charity organisation. In 1996 I did a computer programming course at the Middlesex University. However, the courses were dumped down within a month at the request of most students who were only interested in the Internet rather than Machine Language or C++. The university used Apple computers. Students made films using Multimedia Director software and 3 D modelling software. We were introduced to making videos and digital manipulation. To do my projects at home, I bought an Apple computer and a scanner. However, it was a low-end computer. The software were beyond our means. Students were using pirated copies of softwares even on their own PC computers at home.
A few years later, I dumped this Apple computer on my sister in Burma and bought another powerful custom-built PC (with a self-installed CD rewritable Drive) which I used until 1998 when it was replaced with a more powerful one (with a DVD rewritable Drive) which passed away in 2006. My Desktop Era ended in 2006.
The Rise of Laptops and netbooks! (2002 -
I bought my first Compaq laptop in 2002 but WindowXP and OfficeXP disabled it for the next four years. I was inflicted with frequent temporary paralysis in legs for the next four years and was busy repairing my own malfunctioned carbon-based hardware, chips and operating system. So, I just left my Compaq laptop in its original box while the old desktop was still alive. Only in 2006 after the death of my Carreria desktop, I spent several days to download all service packages and security patches to fix all XPs on this four year old unused laptop. I needed this as a home-based computer. This 2002 computer with outdated software was already ancient in 2006. So in the same year, I bought a new Dell laptop for use during my travels. My old 2002 Compaq became the server for my BT Broadband at home. Then I also bought a cheap secondhand IBM laptop as a spare. This IBM laptop died a few months later. Because there was no guarantee for a secondhand computer, I just buried it temporarily in a box so that I could perform a postmortem later.
I was quickly disappointed with the new Dell laptop. Its screen is badly-lit. I cannot see the screen under a bright light. So I needed to buy a small laptop with a brightly backlit screen. Initially, I did not want to buy an AppleMac because I could not afford its expensive software. However, I eventually dug deep into my empty wallet to get a MacBookPro in 2009 with FileMaker Pro 10 and MS Office Suite.
I have been using my Mac most of the time to browse the Internet, to write blogs and to work on FileMaker Pro 10 databases. However, I cannot update my Yahoo Business website on my Mac with my old software on my PC laptop. Only earlier today I discovered a free compatible web-authoring software to be used with the Firefox browser on my Mac.
Yes I love my MacBook Pro. It is sleek, unique and chic. It is beautiful, wonderful and powerful. However, I cannot afford Dreamweaver Suites, Acrobat Studios and other high-end graphic software.
And I lost the whole contents of my old website designed and built on PCs when it was updated on my Mac. I have not tested this new Mac web-authoring software that whether it is also compatible with Microsoft OS on PC laptops. Sometimes I like to work on my Dell and sometimes I like work on my Mac. However, life is never simple between AppleMac OS and Microsoft OS. Why can't professional Mac softwares be a lot cheaper for the mankind?
The Rise of Digital Books, IPad and Touch Tablets (2009 -
I bought an Ilex Iliad digital book in early 2009. The internal storage was full after I had purchased 10 language and specialists' dictionaries for my work. So I had to download thousands of free books on external storage media: SD cards, MMCards and USB sticks which I always carry in my handbag. The whole package cost me more than £1000. However, this device stopped working properly a year later_ annoyingly just after its guarantee expired. It was such a disappointment to me. However, all these storage media filled with thousands of books are still useful with my MacBookPro. When IPad came out, I became cautious for the first time. It is gorgeous. And it has colour. The screen is incomparable. However, the storage specification and the internet connection options are not satisfactory to me at least. Within a year, several rival products with better specification have appeared in the market. I am still waiting. So far, my MacBook Pro is my digital book. I use it to read newspapers, books and whatever is on the net. I use it to watch television, videos and films. And I can do whatever I want on this machine. Still then,... Can we have cheaper professional graphic and web-authoring Mac applications for the mankind?
The Shape of Space Silo or Space Silos
In my comment to Burmese scientists on 12 November 2010, I write about my thoughts about the SPACE. I write that I wonder whether it is enclosed in a sphere within a sphere. That is completely wrong. We do not know the actual shape of "this silo" enclosing the space where our universe or other universes exist? Is the silo of THIS SPACE in other shapes rather than in the shape of a sphere? Is there any silo at all? Has space no end and no beginning? There seems to be no answer to the actual nature of space? We can only think about the space in relation to an object as in the space in the room and the space in our universe. We can also talk about space and time? The rest about space is completely unknowable to me.
Letter to a Burmese Astronomer on 12 November 2010
Here is my encouragement on 12 November 2010 to a group of young Burmese who are sharing their knowledge about Astronomy with other Burmese.
Thank you for your blog about astronomy in Burmese. I hope to see more about astrophysics and particle physics on your site. I have just skimmed Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design. It will be my Christmas present for a European who still lives in the first century AD. I think this book will be easy enough for this person. Personally, I prefer other writers like Michio Kaku (Parallel Worlds). Now astrophysicists are arguing about what came before the Big Bang. I thought about it many years ago and guessed that there was always something before the Big Bang. Now, an Indian chap is saying that every expanding universe shrinks back to a singularity which then explodes with a big bang to create another expanding universe until it repeats the same process again {The Big Crunch; the Big Bang; The Big Bounce). As you and your friends know, some talk about multiverses, colliding universes, m-theory (string theory) or the theory of everything. Well what about the space? I think the space is more mysterious than the rest. It is said that there are multiverses, colliding universes with dark matters and countless numbers of blackholes and whatever that has not been discovered yet in this SPACE. Is there the end and the beginning of this space? Is this space like a sphere with an enclosing membrane? Is this space inside another space? Or is this space just a sphere of countless numbers of other bubbles inside a supermassive space inside another supermassive space like the fractals repeating the same patterns endlessly. This is mind-boggling. We are lucky to be born in the last century or to live in this century. There is so much to know and to discover. And we know for sure, nothing lasts for ever. Universes and everything in them do not last forever. So while we are still allowed to exist for such a short time, we should discover whatever we can and help others to share what we have discovered. Keep up your good work. You are generous. I never thought of using my time to share what little I have discovered with the others like you.
Thank you for your blog about astronomy in Burmese. I hope to see more about astrophysics and particle physics on your site. I have just skimmed Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design. It will be my Christmas present for a European who still lives in the first century AD. I think this book will be easy enough for this person. Personally, I prefer other writers like Michio Kaku (Parallel Worlds). Now astrophysicists are arguing about what came before the Big Bang. I thought about it many years ago and guessed that there was always something before the Big Bang. Now, an Indian chap is saying that every expanding universe shrinks back to a singularity which then explodes with a big bang to create another expanding universe until it repeats the same process again {The Big Crunch; the Big Bang; The Big Bounce). As you and your friends know, some talk about multiverses, colliding universes, m-theory (string theory) or the theory of everything. Well what about the space? I think the space is more mysterious than the rest. It is said that there are multiverses, colliding universes with dark matters and countless numbers of blackholes and whatever that has not been discovered yet in this SPACE. Is there the end and the beginning of this space? Is this space like a sphere with an enclosing membrane? Is this space inside another space? Or is this space just a sphere of countless numbers of other bubbles inside a supermassive space inside another supermassive space like the fractals repeating the same patterns endlessly. This is mind-boggling. We are lucky to be born in the last century or to live in this century. There is so much to know and to discover. And we know for sure, nothing lasts for ever. Universes and everything in them do not last forever. So while we are still allowed to exist for such a short time, we should discover whatever we can and help others to share what we have discovered. Keep up your good work. You are generous. I never thought of using my time to share what little I have discovered with the others like you.
Sunday, 21 November 2010
Loved Ones
Yesterday, Daw Ngwe Pan Phyu had to help a friend, working on some ancient documents. Suddenly, she felt like having sweets to survive through the whole night. She dislikes sweet and will not eat anything sweet for months until her sugar-starved cells in her body force her to eat sugar-filled snacks.
There is a newly opened cake shop at the place which used to be a ceramic museum on the ground floor of her building. She was curious about the shop and wanted to try some cakes there. When she entered this ultra-posh patisseries shop, she suddenly realised that she could not get out without spending at least £8! She did not want to embarrass herself in front of staring well-dressed customers who were surprised to see Daw Phyu in her frumpy house clothes. So she bought two scoops of pistachio ice-cream and two pieces of cream strawberry and coffee cakes. She came back to her flat after spending nearly £9 accidentally. She consoled herself that she should treat herself like the rich and the famous for once.
After having ice-cream, she continued her work. At midnight, she finished her first document. To celebrate this, she had her luxurious midnight tea. Then suddenly she realised that she was born many many years ago at the precise moment somewhere in the middle of bloody battlefields. She does not want to celebrate her birthday as a ritual but she would like to imagine how her mother giving birth to her at this precise time of her birth every year. As usual she quietly and solemnly thought for a few minutes about her 22 year old grieving mother giving birth to her third child _ a few months after the death of previous two baby daughters in extreme poverty while her young husband was being trained as a cadet at Maymyo Military Academy. Then she resumed the next document until she could not stay awake any longer. She was rudely awoken by her alarm clock at 4.00 a.m. She had slept less than two hours. Then she continued her work until it was finished. After sending finished copies to her friend who had been waiting to hear from her for ten days, she fell asleep listening to Bach's Mass in B Minor.
When she woke up again, she read some online newspapers while listening to Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out. She proudly acquired her own CD copy of this jazz masterpiece only a few days ago. When her father played the music of Dave Brubeck's quartet on his record player in the early 1960, her musically deaf mother complaint about the noise made by crazy people striking pots and pans with ladles. She preferred quiet Burmese semi-classical songs and refused to develop an acquired Western taste that Daw Phyu and her father had. Now Daw Phyu is listening to her old lover, Time Out, again while writing this blog.
A few hours earlier, she accidentally discovered a few videos featuring Andrew Wyett's paintings on YouTube. She was thrilled. She had sadly missed these videos for nearly two years. In 1987, she discovered Andrew Wyett in Time Magazine. The painting titled "The Lover" immediately reminded her of Drürer and Rembrendt who were a few of her favourite painters at that time. When she came back to London in early 1989, she bought "Helga" as soon as it was published. She did not have even £50 in her bank account but she spent £20 on this art book. However to her mild disappointment, this collection included only a few paintings of Wyett. Since she got her personal internet connection in 1994, she has been downloading whatever Wyett she discovered on the internet for off-line viewing. Earlier today, she was overwhelmed to discover on YouTube many more Wyett's paintings that she had not seen before. She would like to see all in the famous Christina's World collection and other famous Wyett's collections.
A presenter commented that his paintings had influence on many artists and their works such as some Hollywood films like "Days of Heaven" in the Twentieth Century. Daw Phyu has never doubted about this. However, Daw Phyu has never been to the United States and seen his influence firsthand there. Then she suddenly realised why she always wanted to see "Days of Heaven" repeatedly despite her extreme dislike of cocky Richard Gere and the character he played. Scenes in this film were like Wyett's paintings. Now Daw Phyu knew that the film artistic director recreated Wyett's America. She also likes the scenes of "O' Brother Where are thou?" She will never get tired of viewing such films repeatedly. Today, she feels that she has been given many birthday presents by those who have posted Wyett on YouTube. And now she is listening to Brubeck, her other old love. And she is also thinking of her late gentle and kind mother who was nursing her one day old baby in her arms at this precise moment, many many moons ago.
There is a newly opened cake shop at the place which used to be a ceramic museum on the ground floor of her building. She was curious about the shop and wanted to try some cakes there. When she entered this ultra-posh patisseries shop, she suddenly realised that she could not get out without spending at least £8! She did not want to embarrass herself in front of staring well-dressed customers who were surprised to see Daw Phyu in her frumpy house clothes. So she bought two scoops of pistachio ice-cream and two pieces of cream strawberry and coffee cakes. She came back to her flat after spending nearly £9 accidentally. She consoled herself that she should treat herself like the rich and the famous for once.
After having ice-cream, she continued her work. At midnight, she finished her first document. To celebrate this, she had her luxurious midnight tea. Then suddenly she realised that she was born many many years ago at the precise moment somewhere in the middle of bloody battlefields. She does not want to celebrate her birthday as a ritual but she would like to imagine how her mother giving birth to her at this precise time of her birth every year. As usual she quietly and solemnly thought for a few minutes about her 22 year old grieving mother giving birth to her third child _ a few months after the death of previous two baby daughters in extreme poverty while her young husband was being trained as a cadet at Maymyo Military Academy. Then she resumed the next document until she could not stay awake any longer. She was rudely awoken by her alarm clock at 4.00 a.m. She had slept less than two hours. Then she continued her work until it was finished. After sending finished copies to her friend who had been waiting to hear from her for ten days, she fell asleep listening to Bach's Mass in B Minor.
When she woke up again, she read some online newspapers while listening to Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out. She proudly acquired her own CD copy of this jazz masterpiece only a few days ago. When her father played the music of Dave Brubeck's quartet on his record player in the early 1960, her musically deaf mother complaint about the noise made by crazy people striking pots and pans with ladles. She preferred quiet Burmese semi-classical songs and refused to develop an acquired Western taste that Daw Phyu and her father had. Now Daw Phyu is listening to her old lover, Time Out, again while writing this blog.
A few hours earlier, she accidentally discovered a few videos featuring Andrew Wyett's paintings on YouTube. She was thrilled. She had sadly missed these videos for nearly two years. In 1987, she discovered Andrew Wyett in Time Magazine. The painting titled "The Lover" immediately reminded her of Drürer and Rembrendt who were a few of her favourite painters at that time. When she came back to London in early 1989, she bought "Helga" as soon as it was published. She did not have even £50 in her bank account but she spent £20 on this art book. However to her mild disappointment, this collection included only a few paintings of Wyett. Since she got her personal internet connection in 1994, she has been downloading whatever Wyett she discovered on the internet for off-line viewing. Earlier today, she was overwhelmed to discover on YouTube many more Wyett's paintings that she had not seen before. She would like to see all in the famous Christina's World collection and other famous Wyett's collections.
A presenter commented that his paintings had influence on many artists and their works such as some Hollywood films like "Days of Heaven" in the Twentieth Century. Daw Phyu has never doubted about this. However, Daw Phyu has never been to the United States and seen his influence firsthand there. Then she suddenly realised why she always wanted to see "Days of Heaven" repeatedly despite her extreme dislike of cocky Richard Gere and the character he played. Scenes in this film were like Wyett's paintings. Now Daw Phyu knew that the film artistic director recreated Wyett's America. She also likes the scenes of "O' Brother Where are thou?" She will never get tired of viewing such films repeatedly. Today, she feels that she has been given many birthday presents by those who have posted Wyett on YouTube. And now she is listening to Brubeck, her other old love. And she is also thinking of her late gentle and kind mother who was nursing her one day old baby in her arms at this precise moment, many many moons ago.
Sunday, 14 November 2010
13 November 2010
Daw Phyu was stuck to the television for two days before and after Daw Suu was released. She watched the joyful scene of people rushing to the gate of Daw Suu's house repeatedly and the interviews of journalists and politicians. In the early morning of the 14th November, she fell asleep with the television on. Suddenly she found herself running among the people on the television screen towards Daw Suu's gate. She did not want to miss this moment. She was so happy. Then suddenly, she was pulled from behind and was dragged backward. While she was being dragged to the opposition direction by a strong unknown force, some people turned and looked. Then they turned away and kept on running ahead. Suddenly, Daw Phyu was being dragged violently in the darkness. The people were gone. She thought she was already dead. The dragging stopped suddenly and Daw Phyu found herself at the foot of the narrow stairs towards a lighted room above. Then she was carried gently towards the upper floor. Two elderly women were there. Then she recognised it was her dead mother's room. She asked the women where her mother was. They said she was out visiting friends and wanted Daw Phyu to wait until her return. Then Daw Phyu woke up with sadness; she was not to see her mother again. She immediately turned off the television and tried to sleep again. She couldn't sleep, thinking about Daw Suu. Daw Phyu is worried, very worried! Some Western-based politicians obviously want her to use the same old confrontational approach. Daw Phyu can send only best wishes for her well-being and success in whatever obstacles she and faithful followers are facing in this national reconciliation process. No more unfairness and injustice please! No more provocation please! No more riots please! No more bloody crack-downs please! And no more suffering please! And no more ....
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Daw Suu has been released.
I am now watching BBC 24. Daw Suu has just been released. People waiting for her release are shouting with joy. I am very happy for Burma and for all these faithful and brave followers inside Burma. I do not need to say anything more. Others inside Burma and outside Burma will have so much so say about this. So please read the mind, the heart and the words of especially some of those outside the country carefully. I just want to say that I am happy and wish and hope for the best of Burma. I am also sending all the best wishes to the Lady of Burma and the people of Burma in their struggle for democracy.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Stop All Wars!
Daw Ngwe Pan Phyu has been possessed by Brahms' "Ein Deutsches Requiem" and Elgar's Enigma (Nimrod) for some years. Whenever she sees images of wars and suffering of people all over the world, she is haunted by these masterpieces.
Western Europeans have grown up in the latter part of the twentieth century. Germans, French, English and Russians are no longer slaughtering each other. There are only very rare symbolic tribal conflicts among their national football supporters. Or has Europe again become a war zone or a semi-militarised zone of some sort? There is already constant security surveillance in all European cities and ports. However, Daw Phyu still feels safe living in London, a war-free European city. Unlike peaceful Europe, civil wars are still being fought in many other parts of the world. People are still slaughtering one another just to benefit arms manufacturers and various opportunistic unsavoury pro-war characters whose luxurious existence and careers partly or wholly depend on conflicts all over the world.
Daw Phyu has three recordings of "Ein Deutsches Requiem" on CD, two recordings on DVDs and an LP. All were conducted by Herbert von Karajan. She is also proud to have both an LP and a CD of a historical recording of Karajan and his Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1947. At this first performance of this masterpiece by Karajan in 1947, the whole Western Europe mourned the dead and injured in the WWW II. Brahms actually composed EDR for the death of his mother. The other CD recordings are 1964 recording with Berliner Philharmoniker with Gundula Janowitz and 1985 recording of Opus 45 with Wiener Philharmoniker. Daw Phyu tends to listen to 1964 recording more. Of her two DVDs, she slightly prefers 1978 recording with Berliner Phiharmoniker with Janowitz and Van Dam to Opus 45 with Wiener Philharmoniker. All recordings have the same effect on Daw Ngwe Pan Phyu in her empathetic moods towards the fallen of all sides and the suffering civilians.
Before Daw Phyu discovered Brahms, Bach's Matthew Passion and Verdi's Nabucco Act III Va Pensiero (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) were her sole therapy whenever she suffered extreme grief and ridiculous persecution complex in the past. Recently, she saw The Metropolitan Opera's Nabbucco on a DVD and was overwhelmed by the chorus.
In 2010, she discovered "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind" by Marlene Dietrich on YouTube. Some comments for this video were seen to have been deleted. Sadly, some people are still fighting the WWII. Marlene left Nazi Germany and she sang this song for the fallen soldiers from all sides, not just for the German.
In 1980 or 1981, Daw Ngwe Pan Phyu was given a TOTP compilation album on a cassette tape by her Kachin friend MDB whose father was an ex-army captain. She and a group of other Kachin girls lived in a private hostel on the edge of the University campus in Rangoon in the seventies and eighties. They had already graduated from various universities but could not let go of their fun days. Daw Phyu, an estranged daughter of a retired Burmese army officer, was emotionally supported by these wonderful Kachin friends, a Kayah friend and a Chin friend while her own Burmese community could not understand her disobedience and failure to observe her filial duties. Daw Phyu who is actually of Burmese, Mon and a trace of Chinese origin, never shared a room with anyone else in Burma but with a Chin friend named K for six months. She did not even share her room with any of her siblings. Her Chin friend, K, was a daughter of an ex- army Lt. Colonel in the Burmese Army. Her insurgent brother died at the hand of another insurgent in the jungle in the early seventies. The family could not even grieve publicly because the father was still working for the Burmese Army at that time. Daw Phyu lived with these fun-loving friends in that hostel for nearly ten years.
One of the songs in the album given by Daw Phyu's Kachin friend MDB was Jona Lewie's "Stop the Calvary". Daw Phyu kept on listening to this song for days because it sounded Christmasy and catchy and not because of its anti-war message. She was also given a John Lennon's album containing "War is Over". Daw Suu also shared a few albums by Joan Beaz and Bod Dylan with these friends. She loved looking at the picture of Joan Beaz on the album cover while listening to her songs. Daw Phyu shared her love for jazz only with a Kachin friend, a singer named Mg. This peace-loving friend is known for her generosity, kindness and piety. She shared her food and latest international bestsellers from an expensive book rental shop in the Inya Road with Daw Phyu.
Daw Phyu's father was a musical snob; he introduced her to some western classical music, jazz and Hollywood big band orchestras but banned her from listening to even Elvis. He also allowed her to listen to only Burmese classical songs, the orchestral instrumental music and a few Burmese oldies. When she came and lived with these Kachin friends, she could bring only a few of her father's records with her because she did not have a cassette or a record-player of her own at first. BBC World Service classical music concerts and jazz programmes on her powerful shortwave radio were played every week. These were offensive politically to the untrained ears of Daw Phyu's next-door neighbours, the ultra-nationalist Burmese from areas such as Pegu and the surrounding areas. They could not understand why this Burmese and her Kachin friends loved these strange sounds of "decadent" western music. The walls of the hostel were not sound-proofed. Daw Phyu did not want to listen to their noisy idle gossips on the other side of the wall and they definitely did not want to listen to this decadent music.
At the hostel, Daw Phyu was fiercely protected by her Kachin friends even from a small wardering green snake one day. One Kachin girl entered her room and saw the snake hanging on the window iron railing above Daw Phyu's head. She left quietly as she entered while Daw Phyu was reading a book. Daw Phyu did not notice the slithering snake above her head. Daw Phyu thought her friend did not want to disturb her reading. Then she came back with six other Kachins with huge bamboo sticks to kill the snake. Daw Phyu tried to prevent the slaughter of this harmless green snake which subsequently escaped to the roof. Her friends were furious at Daw Phyu for not allowing them a chance to kill this bad Satanic creature! Then the snake reappeared in the next room a few hours later. Now it was the time for the Buddhist hostel porter to rescue the wandering snake, infuriating the Kachins again. This incident became a favourite talk among the girls for months!
In the sixties and seventies, Daw Phyu _ like other Burmese _ did not have a television to watch Vietnam war footages. And when she was still living with her family before 1979, her father always censored images of war and victims of holocausts in Life, Times and Newsweeks before they reached Daw Phyu and her siblings. However, her father introduced her to BBC World Service English language news as early as 1962 but she had not seen television footages of destructions and casualties of wars in Burma as well as in other parts of the world. She did not sense her mother's worry whenever her father was sent away to the front as an electronic expert.
In 1979, she was taken to a military hospital by a Chinese friend who wanted to visit give her friend, a matron, for some medical advice. They made a wrong turn and found themselves in a wing where they were not supposed to be. There she and her friend shockingly saw so many disfigured soldiers without limbs; some were reduced to vegetative states hidden from the public view probably forever. Her friend fainted and they had to return home in a taxi rather than by bus. On her way home, Daw Phyu also thought about the number of fatalities of civilians as well as soldiers during this civil war.
At that time, the ballads of John Lennon, Jona Lewie, Bob Dylan and Joan Beaz were the only popular songs for her to listen to whenever she was in her anti-war mood. She had not heard any war-protest songs in Burmese but only songs about bravery of warriors and soldiers. When she was only four or five, her father introduced her and siblings to Western classical music and jazz on records and some music on the radio. He talked about the dragon, the gods, the hero and their battles on some records. Now Daw Phyu knows these were highlighters of Wagner's Ring. What do you expect from an army officer father? She loved listening to the secular music of Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Mozart on BBC World Service and on weekly World Music programs (both in Burmese and English sections) from the State-run Burmese Broadcasting Service. However, she did not discover the delight of choral music of Brahms and Bach until she came to the West in 1984. In Burma she and her father considered them to be in the domain of those with Christian faith.
The sight of an army of limbless torsos in the military hospital in 1979 also triggered her childhood memory in the mid fifties. A four-year old Daw Phyu was excited to see frightened crows circling overhead after the sound of salutary gunfires. These sounds came from the nearby war cemetery. It broke the silence and tranquility of the field at the foot of a hill covered with wild jasmine bushes. She lived with her family in a barrack at the foot of this hill between between 1955 and 1961. She did not know why these guns were fired almost every day at that time. Throughout her life, she also kept on hearing the husky voice of the ghost of a young Christian Karan army officer who frequently visited her house at that time. He taught her the first poem when she was about four. At that time, her father was attached to the same military hospital which she visited years later. Similar sights of mutilated bodies in this military hospital was what her peace-loving cowardly father was forced to see every day during this purgatory period. He was said to have done misappropriation for handing out six army uniforms to six army officers who just came back from the front without written authorisation. All sorts of allegations followed and he was demoted from the rank of an army captain and was paid with half a salary of a lieutenant for many years. Years later, Daw Phyu learnt that her father was said to have interfered with the decision of a kangaroo court judge to save his communist brother when many areas of Burma was overrun by a motley of insurgent groups.
The young Karen bachelor officer was among a very few loyal friends who did not forsake Daw Phyu's father at that time. Her family was housed in a rundown WWII barrack with a concrete floor and an outdoor open toilet while the other officers' families were living in style in lovely Western style semi-detached houses nearby. The concrete floor of the barrack with a leaking roof was often submerged from fresh floods from the hill nearby during endless rainy days. And there were also accidental man-made floods from the huge water tank on top of the hill. However, young Daw Phyu thought these days were full of fun. She even anticipated such deluge. She imagined swimming in a beautiful lake full of tiny silver fish! The flood from the tank always brought these tiny silver fish. The tank stored the water from a reservoir. When her brother first learned to walk barefoot on the cold and wet concrete floor, Daw Phyu helped him so that he would not fall and injure himself. This six year old girl really loved looking after her tiny baby brother in this barrack which she called home. Only when her brother did not come back from the hospital after catching a cold, she felt the dampness, the mould and the cold of the barrack. Her brother died at the age of one year and eight months. That was in early August 1959. It rained nonstop for nearly three months. He shed two drops of tears before he gave out his last breath, Daw Phyu's mother said.
Although these were the years of humiliation and hardship for Daw Phyu's parents, Daw Phyu was very extremely happy until the death of her young brother. He was the very first person she had bonded with. There was another one, that Karan army officer who taught her nursery rhymes during his visit to her father at that time. She had no playmates because she did not bond with her second sister and her cousin who acted like biological twins as well as with her third sister. Her mother and her aunt, a single mother, were consumed their self pity and busy with four younger children. Every evening and weekends, her father and his friends were always busy in his electronic lab which he curved out of from a huge area from the barrack. They even forgot to send her to school until she was six and a half. However, Daw Phyu was not worried about being forgotten by everybody. Before she started taking care of her baby brother, she preferred roaming alone on the hill, hearing the music that she had heard in her mind repeatedly, picking jasmine flowers and edible berries from some evergreen bushes. She also liked to sit quietly under the large black tank watching ants and insects. She loved chasing butterflies among wildflowers on the hill. She liked to smell the sweet fragrance of the earth just after the first showers of the raining seasons. Occasional visits to a nearby army cinema where she saw Hollywood big-budget musicals always delighted her. She did not need a music player to listen to these songs again; they were played repeatedly in her mind when she was roaming alone on the hill.
Other officers in the posh neighbourhood on a higher ground did not socialise with Daw Phyu's disgraced father and her mother at all. Only this young Karen officer, three Shan officers and a Shan sergeant working in an army kitchen always visited her father. Her father always talked fondly of this gentle Karen officer who liked teaching children poems and the kitchen chef who brought a box containing cans of condensed milk and eggs for Daw Phyu and siblings every time he visited her father. Now Daw Phyu knows how much this childless Shan sergeant and his wife and this officer cared about this young Burmese family in disgrace.
In the early seventies, the Karen officer and his jeep were blown up into pieces near Paan. He was a major at that time. His own brothers on the opposing side "got" him eventually for taking side with the Burmese national army. He was survived by his wife and very young children whom Daw Phyu has never met. She would like to see them one day. She would like to meet them to hug them and to recite the first Burmese nursery rhyme she learnt from their father before they were born.
From 1962 to 1972, Daw Phyu's family lived near Ahlone Road in Rangoon. There were eight officers' families living in two rows of large wooden houses with large fruit gardens. When Daw Phyu's family first arrived at this Garden of Eden, they found a Karan Christian officer's family living in the house facing theirs. The officer was in detention for allegation of divided loyalty and espionage at that time. Daw Phyu's father talked about the absurdity of the allegations. The officer's wife and her sister seemed to be hiding in the house for months initially. However, the children came out playing with Daw Phyu and her siblings a few months later. KMA became Daw Phyu's very first neighbour who is also a friend. Daw Phyu had a lot of friends at school but she did not have any playmates at home when her father was in the same situation as KMA's father some years ago. By the time, she got her first neighbour, she was already ten. KMA was two years younger. She and KMA were filled with sorrow when both families were transferred to different locations again. Daw Phyu often bumped into KMA's older brother at the Rangoon University. KMA's family was transferred to Thaton area where she got married and had a child before finishing her high school. In 1973 or 1974, Daw Phyu was visited by KMA unexpectedly at her house in the Bogyoke Road. She rushed into Daw Phyu's arm and cried uncontrollably. Her husband who was only a teenager was shot dead while hiding behind a well in Thaton; the town was overrun by Karen insurgents. He was there to sit for the matriculation examination. She talked about how he kissed her and her baby before he went to the examination hall that day. She said that it was an execution of a school boy. After this sorrowful visit, Daw Phyu lost contact with KMA.
Daw Phyu also remembers a Shan officer named SSP who provided her family temporary accommodation twice in a Shan village in a place called 9 Miles in Rangoon. At that time, her father was transferred to several places within a very short period. Without his help, there would have been so much inconvenience before Daw Phyu's parents found suitable accommodation for their young children. That was after her father's past sins against the national Burmese army were exonerated eight years later. SSP was very tall and slim; he was a spitting image of James Coburn, a Hollywood movie star. Daw Phyu's father and SSP were very good friends. However, my father seemed to have lost contact with them in the mid sixties.
In the early 1980s, T who was one of Daw Phyu's colleagues and university classmates lost her father in a very tragic circumstance. Her father who was a Buddhist Arakanese went back to the north Arakan State where he and his ancestors owned lands. He went there alone to negotiate with the squatters on his ancestral land. The squatters disembowelled him and tied him to a tree, leaving him to bleed to death. The whole department was shocked to hear this account from her. T's personal loss affected Daw Phyu deeply even though T was not very close to her like her Arakanese high schoolmate, MSO, who introduced communist literature (novels and poems from the former Soviet Union) to her at the school. This schoolmate risked serious punishments by smuggling these into classes probably at the request of her divorced mother's Communist boyfriend who came back from Poland after many years. Daw Phyu also smuggled them into her house under the eagle-eyes of her father who banned Communist literature at home even though his brother was a Communist.
The last one, but not the least, who Daw Phyu wants to talk about is her best friend, E, a Karen Christian (COE) friend she first met at the University. E introduced Daw Phyu to public libraries in Rangoon. Daw Phyu's father had a large collection of English and Burmese books of his own choice. However, she was never taken to a public library. In fact, her father did not even want his children to visit friends. Daw Phyu was allowed to visit her schoolmates only twice at the high school. The drivers who took Daw Phyu and her siblings to schools and evening schools also watched every step of Daw Phyu and her siblings.
When Daw Phyu went to the University, her family became very poor. They no longer had the luxury of being provided with free cars and drivers by the State. So her father had no choice but to allow her to use public transports for the first time. At the same time, her family was struggling to survive barely with her father's salary. Consequently, Daw Phyu had to work in the evenings and on weekends to support herself and her studies. She was a bit resentful that she had to work while her classmates were studying. She had been a bright science student at the High School; so she disliked being behind others at the University because she did not have enough time to study. To make matter worse, she was no longer studying physics or maths, her favourites subjects. She was struggling with English literature and other new subjects such as western philosophy, history, psychology, geography and economics taught in English. Then another blow struck her unexpectedly. She was diagnosed with a full-blown tuberculosis that she contracted in a summer camp just before she came to the University. She and her third brother whom she had infected with this disease were quarantined at home, missing more lecturers during her first year and second year at the University.
There were 28 classmates in her class; most were assertive and smart children of former diplomats, government ministers and very rich people. Daw Phyu became depressed among new friends who had nothing to do with her quiet social background. It was E and C, another Karen student who accepted Daw Phyu as their friends. They belong to Church of England. There was another Anglo-Burmese friend called M who was a Roman Catholic who became Daw Phyu's friend. E helped Daw Phyu with her studies. Daw Phyu and E became inseparable throughout her university days.
E's widowed father and brother worked for the government to support E whose mother died when she was eight. They were very poor because her father salary as a legal clerk at the High Court and her brother's salary as a military clerk were barely enough for them to survive. She was fiercely independent because she had been mostly left alone to defend herself from the very young age. Her brother and father had to go out to work to support her.
E's father was a theosophist and pacifist. E and her father took Daw Phyu to Insein seminary and many other theosophists' lectures and public libraries. Daw Phyu's father became increasingly uneasy to see his daughter's close friendship with Christians. He was worried that Daw Phyu would convert to become a Catholic or a Protestant. Ironically, what he had not realised was that Daw Phyu had silently lost her religion a long time before she met E, C and M. She just kept her atheism to herself in order not to upset her mother and friends. There were rows between Daw Phyu and her father regarding her religious outlook. Her father's busybody Buddhist monk unwisely got involved in this conflict which led to Daw Phyu's leaving her family a few years later.
While Daw Phyu was living with the Kachin, E visited her one day unexpectedly. She wanted Daw Phyu to persuade her father, Pa Pa, to cancel his peace mission to the rebel-controlled area. She was worried that her father would be torn apart by his brothers on the other side. At that time, Rangoon was hit by a few bombs. Railways lines between Pegu and Thaton were also bombed. Security was tight and travellers suffered delay and those who had Karen facial features were harassed at checkpoints. Daw Phyu and E tried to talk to her father who had already packed his rucksack for his peace mission. Then suddenly, he had a stroke and took months to die at the Rangoon General Hospital. After his death, E requested Daw Phyu to live with her at her house in the outskirts of Rangoon. She was too scared to live alone. Her brother was no longer living in Rangoon. Daw Phyu let her down in her need because she did not like to commute to her work daily in unreliable buses. And she liked living near the University with her new Kachin friends. Daw Phyu still feels guilty about this. E like her father wants peace in her birthplace, Thandaung. Now she is a retired civil servant and was last heard two years ago when she was planning to work for an NGO. Daw Phyu knows she is always preaching the gospel of peace like her father Pa Pa that Daw Phyu loved and respected so much.
For the last twenty-two years, there have been more displacement, destructions and loss of lives in countryside as well as in some areas of towns and cities. Daw Phyu hates wars and those celebrating war conquests.
Military conquests are celebrated with pomps and ceremonies by winners and "the good". At the same time, their own "collateral damages of wars" should be best forgotten and hidden if they could. Atrocities committed by losers and "the bad" must be recorded carefully for further witch-hunt of the perpetrators and their families in the conquered areas. Many say; our fighters are heroes; but theirs are war criminals. Some of our methods we use in our fight against our enemies save lives and therefore they are justifiable means to achieve the end _ "peace and our ideals". However, we must condemn the other side to use these methods. It is crude and inhumane to stab an enemy with a bayonet while it is viewed OK to press a button in a plane in safety high above to roast tens of thousands below. And we still need to keep our nuclear weapons!
Daw Phyu yearns for peace in Burma and in the whole world. She wants to live on a nuclear weapon free planet. She wants to shout and shout: "Please stop killing each other. Please stop killing animals and trees. Please stop killing the planet that we share with other life forms."
She also wants to scream at promoters and punters of these dogfights or cockfights between divided people; "Stop inciting wars and hatred between groups of different racial and religious origins. Ask all sides to stop fighting and arming themselves. And also please, please get rid of all nuclear weapons on the whole planet." However, she knows that these people will not listen.
Daw Phyu also wants to share the music that she love with others who feel the same about wars and conflicts.
Some of those reading this blog already know these composers and their works. So they are requested to forgive Daw Phyu for writing about music that they know. However, there may be some readers who still have not discovered them. And please also forgive Daw Phyu for her love for Wagner which she first heard when she was still a child of four if you find Wagner too German. Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart were German too. Music belongs to the whole mankind.
Here are the links which Daw Phyu hopes to work.
To sample Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg7sU5B_ibM
To sample Bach's Matthew Passion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_LLFfFXaUA
To sample Verdi's Nabucco III Chorus of the Hebrew Slave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjxncnQ6iLI
Elgar - Enigma (Nimrod) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE
Marlene War Protest Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3ET1b0ymZs
Stop the Calvary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zngTrdW-vio
War is Over: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etbucgvjhwo
Western Europeans have grown up in the latter part of the twentieth century. Germans, French, English and Russians are no longer slaughtering each other. There are only very rare symbolic tribal conflicts among their national football supporters. Or has Europe again become a war zone or a semi-militarised zone of some sort? There is already constant security surveillance in all European cities and ports. However, Daw Phyu still feels safe living in London, a war-free European city. Unlike peaceful Europe, civil wars are still being fought in many other parts of the world. People are still slaughtering one another just to benefit arms manufacturers and various opportunistic unsavoury pro-war characters whose luxurious existence and careers partly or wholly depend on conflicts all over the world.
Daw Phyu has three recordings of "Ein Deutsches Requiem" on CD, two recordings on DVDs and an LP. All were conducted by Herbert von Karajan. She is also proud to have both an LP and a CD of a historical recording of Karajan and his Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1947. At this first performance of this masterpiece by Karajan in 1947, the whole Western Europe mourned the dead and injured in the WWW II. Brahms actually composed EDR for the death of his mother. The other CD recordings are 1964 recording with Berliner Philharmoniker with Gundula Janowitz and 1985 recording of Opus 45 with Wiener Philharmoniker. Daw Phyu tends to listen to 1964 recording more. Of her two DVDs, she slightly prefers 1978 recording with Berliner Phiharmoniker with Janowitz and Van Dam to Opus 45 with Wiener Philharmoniker. All recordings have the same effect on Daw Ngwe Pan Phyu in her empathetic moods towards the fallen of all sides and the suffering civilians.
Before Daw Phyu discovered Brahms, Bach's Matthew Passion and Verdi's Nabucco Act III Va Pensiero (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) were her sole therapy whenever she suffered extreme grief and ridiculous persecution complex in the past. Recently, she saw The Metropolitan Opera's Nabbucco on a DVD and was overwhelmed by the chorus.
In 2010, she discovered "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind" by Marlene Dietrich on YouTube. Some comments for this video were seen to have been deleted. Sadly, some people are still fighting the WWII. Marlene left Nazi Germany and she sang this song for the fallen soldiers from all sides, not just for the German.
In 1980 or 1981, Daw Ngwe Pan Phyu was given a TOTP compilation album on a cassette tape by her Kachin friend MDB whose father was an ex-army captain. She and a group of other Kachin girls lived in a private hostel on the edge of the University campus in Rangoon in the seventies and eighties. They had already graduated from various universities but could not let go of their fun days. Daw Phyu, an estranged daughter of a retired Burmese army officer, was emotionally supported by these wonderful Kachin friends, a Kayah friend and a Chin friend while her own Burmese community could not understand her disobedience and failure to observe her filial duties. Daw Phyu who is actually of Burmese, Mon and a trace of Chinese origin, never shared a room with anyone else in Burma but with a Chin friend named K for six months. She did not even share her room with any of her siblings. Her Chin friend, K, was a daughter of an ex- army Lt. Colonel in the Burmese Army. Her insurgent brother died at the hand of another insurgent in the jungle in the early seventies. The family could not even grieve publicly because the father was still working for the Burmese Army at that time. Daw Phyu lived with these fun-loving friends in that hostel for nearly ten years.
One of the songs in the album given by Daw Phyu's Kachin friend MDB was Jona Lewie's "Stop the Calvary". Daw Phyu kept on listening to this song for days because it sounded Christmasy and catchy and not because of its anti-war message. She was also given a John Lennon's album containing "War is Over". Daw Suu also shared a few albums by Joan Beaz and Bod Dylan with these friends. She loved looking at the picture of Joan Beaz on the album cover while listening to her songs. Daw Phyu shared her love for jazz only with a Kachin friend, a singer named Mg. This peace-loving friend is known for her generosity, kindness and piety. She shared her food and latest international bestsellers from an expensive book rental shop in the Inya Road with Daw Phyu.
Daw Phyu's father was a musical snob; he introduced her to some western classical music, jazz and Hollywood big band orchestras but banned her from listening to even Elvis. He also allowed her to listen to only Burmese classical songs, the orchestral instrumental music and a few Burmese oldies. When she came and lived with these Kachin friends, she could bring only a few of her father's records with her because she did not have a cassette or a record-player of her own at first. BBC World Service classical music concerts and jazz programmes on her powerful shortwave radio were played every week. These were offensive politically to the untrained ears of Daw Phyu's next-door neighbours, the ultra-nationalist Burmese from areas such as Pegu and the surrounding areas. They could not understand why this Burmese and her Kachin friends loved these strange sounds of "decadent" western music. The walls of the hostel were not sound-proofed. Daw Phyu did not want to listen to their noisy idle gossips on the other side of the wall and they definitely did not want to listen to this decadent music.
At the hostel, Daw Phyu was fiercely protected by her Kachin friends even from a small wardering green snake one day. One Kachin girl entered her room and saw the snake hanging on the window iron railing above Daw Phyu's head. She left quietly as she entered while Daw Phyu was reading a book. Daw Phyu did not notice the slithering snake above her head. Daw Phyu thought her friend did not want to disturb her reading. Then she came back with six other Kachins with huge bamboo sticks to kill the snake. Daw Phyu tried to prevent the slaughter of this harmless green snake which subsequently escaped to the roof. Her friends were furious at Daw Phyu for not allowing them a chance to kill this bad Satanic creature! Then the snake reappeared in the next room a few hours later. Now it was the time for the Buddhist hostel porter to rescue the wandering snake, infuriating the Kachins again. This incident became a favourite talk among the girls for months!
In the sixties and seventies, Daw Phyu _ like other Burmese _ did not have a television to watch Vietnam war footages. And when she was still living with her family before 1979, her father always censored images of war and victims of holocausts in Life, Times and Newsweeks before they reached Daw Phyu and her siblings. However, her father introduced her to BBC World Service English language news as early as 1962 but she had not seen television footages of destructions and casualties of wars in Burma as well as in other parts of the world. She did not sense her mother's worry whenever her father was sent away to the front as an electronic expert.
In 1979, she was taken to a military hospital by a Chinese friend who wanted to visit give her friend, a matron, for some medical advice. They made a wrong turn and found themselves in a wing where they were not supposed to be. There she and her friend shockingly saw so many disfigured soldiers without limbs; some were reduced to vegetative states hidden from the public view probably forever. Her friend fainted and they had to return home in a taxi rather than by bus. On her way home, Daw Phyu also thought about the number of fatalities of civilians as well as soldiers during this civil war.
At that time, the ballads of John Lennon, Jona Lewie, Bob Dylan and Joan Beaz were the only popular songs for her to listen to whenever she was in her anti-war mood. She had not heard any war-protest songs in Burmese but only songs about bravery of warriors and soldiers. When she was only four or five, her father introduced her and siblings to Western classical music and jazz on records and some music on the radio. He talked about the dragon, the gods, the hero and their battles on some records. Now Daw Phyu knows these were highlighters of Wagner's Ring. What do you expect from an army officer father? She loved listening to the secular music of Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Mozart on BBC World Service and on weekly World Music programs (both in Burmese and English sections) from the State-run Burmese Broadcasting Service. However, she did not discover the delight of choral music of Brahms and Bach until she came to the West in 1984. In Burma she and her father considered them to be in the domain of those with Christian faith.
The sight of an army of limbless torsos in the military hospital in 1979 also triggered her childhood memory in the mid fifties. A four-year old Daw Phyu was excited to see frightened crows circling overhead after the sound of salutary gunfires. These sounds came from the nearby war cemetery. It broke the silence and tranquility of the field at the foot of a hill covered with wild jasmine bushes. She lived with her family in a barrack at the foot of this hill between between 1955 and 1961. She did not know why these guns were fired almost every day at that time. Throughout her life, she also kept on hearing the husky voice of the ghost of a young Christian Karan army officer who frequently visited her house at that time. He taught her the first poem when she was about four. At that time, her father was attached to the same military hospital which she visited years later. Similar sights of mutilated bodies in this military hospital was what her peace-loving cowardly father was forced to see every day during this purgatory period. He was said to have done misappropriation for handing out six army uniforms to six army officers who just came back from the front without written authorisation. All sorts of allegations followed and he was demoted from the rank of an army captain and was paid with half a salary of a lieutenant for many years. Years later, Daw Phyu learnt that her father was said to have interfered with the decision of a kangaroo court judge to save his communist brother when many areas of Burma was overrun by a motley of insurgent groups.
The young Karen bachelor officer was among a very few loyal friends who did not forsake Daw Phyu's father at that time. Her family was housed in a rundown WWII barrack with a concrete floor and an outdoor open toilet while the other officers' families were living in style in lovely Western style semi-detached houses nearby. The concrete floor of the barrack with a leaking roof was often submerged from fresh floods from the hill nearby during endless rainy days. And there were also accidental man-made floods from the huge water tank on top of the hill. However, young Daw Phyu thought these days were full of fun. She even anticipated such deluge. She imagined swimming in a beautiful lake full of tiny silver fish! The flood from the tank always brought these tiny silver fish. The tank stored the water from a reservoir. When her brother first learned to walk barefoot on the cold and wet concrete floor, Daw Phyu helped him so that he would not fall and injure himself. This six year old girl really loved looking after her tiny baby brother in this barrack which she called home. Only when her brother did not come back from the hospital after catching a cold, she felt the dampness, the mould and the cold of the barrack. Her brother died at the age of one year and eight months. That was in early August 1959. It rained nonstop for nearly three months. He shed two drops of tears before he gave out his last breath, Daw Phyu's mother said.
Although these were the years of humiliation and hardship for Daw Phyu's parents, Daw Phyu was very extremely happy until the death of her young brother. He was the very first person she had bonded with. There was another one, that Karan army officer who taught her nursery rhymes during his visit to her father at that time. She had no playmates because she did not bond with her second sister and her cousin who acted like biological twins as well as with her third sister. Her mother and her aunt, a single mother, were consumed their self pity and busy with four younger children. Every evening and weekends, her father and his friends were always busy in his electronic lab which he curved out of from a huge area from the barrack. They even forgot to send her to school until she was six and a half. However, Daw Phyu was not worried about being forgotten by everybody. Before she started taking care of her baby brother, she preferred roaming alone on the hill, hearing the music that she had heard in her mind repeatedly, picking jasmine flowers and edible berries from some evergreen bushes. She also liked to sit quietly under the large black tank watching ants and insects. She loved chasing butterflies among wildflowers on the hill. She liked to smell the sweet fragrance of the earth just after the first showers of the raining seasons. Occasional visits to a nearby army cinema where she saw Hollywood big-budget musicals always delighted her. She did not need a music player to listen to these songs again; they were played repeatedly in her mind when she was roaming alone on the hill.
Other officers in the posh neighbourhood on a higher ground did not socialise with Daw Phyu's disgraced father and her mother at all. Only this young Karen officer, three Shan officers and a Shan sergeant working in an army kitchen always visited her father. Her father always talked fondly of this gentle Karen officer who liked teaching children poems and the kitchen chef who brought a box containing cans of condensed milk and eggs for Daw Phyu and siblings every time he visited her father. Now Daw Phyu knows how much this childless Shan sergeant and his wife and this officer cared about this young Burmese family in disgrace.
In the early seventies, the Karen officer and his jeep were blown up into pieces near Paan. He was a major at that time. His own brothers on the opposing side "got" him eventually for taking side with the Burmese national army. He was survived by his wife and very young children whom Daw Phyu has never met. She would like to see them one day. She would like to meet them to hug them and to recite the first Burmese nursery rhyme she learnt from their father before they were born.
From 1962 to 1972, Daw Phyu's family lived near Ahlone Road in Rangoon. There were eight officers' families living in two rows of large wooden houses with large fruit gardens. When Daw Phyu's family first arrived at this Garden of Eden, they found a Karan Christian officer's family living in the house facing theirs. The officer was in detention for allegation of divided loyalty and espionage at that time. Daw Phyu's father talked about the absurdity of the allegations. The officer's wife and her sister seemed to be hiding in the house for months initially. However, the children came out playing with Daw Phyu and her siblings a few months later. KMA became Daw Phyu's very first neighbour who is also a friend. Daw Phyu had a lot of friends at school but she did not have any playmates at home when her father was in the same situation as KMA's father some years ago. By the time, she got her first neighbour, she was already ten. KMA was two years younger. She and KMA were filled with sorrow when both families were transferred to different locations again. Daw Phyu often bumped into KMA's older brother at the Rangoon University. KMA's family was transferred to Thaton area where she got married and had a child before finishing her high school. In 1973 or 1974, Daw Phyu was visited by KMA unexpectedly at her house in the Bogyoke Road. She rushed into Daw Phyu's arm and cried uncontrollably. Her husband who was only a teenager was shot dead while hiding behind a well in Thaton; the town was overrun by Karen insurgents. He was there to sit for the matriculation examination. She talked about how he kissed her and her baby before he went to the examination hall that day. She said that it was an execution of a school boy. After this sorrowful visit, Daw Phyu lost contact with KMA.
Daw Phyu also remembers a Shan officer named SSP who provided her family temporary accommodation twice in a Shan village in a place called 9 Miles in Rangoon. At that time, her father was transferred to several places within a very short period. Without his help, there would have been so much inconvenience before Daw Phyu's parents found suitable accommodation for their young children. That was after her father's past sins against the national Burmese army were exonerated eight years later. SSP was very tall and slim; he was a spitting image of James Coburn, a Hollywood movie star. Daw Phyu's father and SSP were very good friends. However, my father seemed to have lost contact with them in the mid sixties.
In the early 1980s, T who was one of Daw Phyu's colleagues and university classmates lost her father in a very tragic circumstance. Her father who was a Buddhist Arakanese went back to the north Arakan State where he and his ancestors owned lands. He went there alone to negotiate with the squatters on his ancestral land. The squatters disembowelled him and tied him to a tree, leaving him to bleed to death. The whole department was shocked to hear this account from her. T's personal loss affected Daw Phyu deeply even though T was not very close to her like her Arakanese high schoolmate, MSO, who introduced communist literature (novels and poems from the former Soviet Union) to her at the school. This schoolmate risked serious punishments by smuggling these into classes probably at the request of her divorced mother's Communist boyfriend who came back from Poland after many years. Daw Phyu also smuggled them into her house under the eagle-eyes of her father who banned Communist literature at home even though his brother was a Communist.
The last one, but not the least, who Daw Phyu wants to talk about is her best friend, E, a Karen Christian (COE) friend she first met at the University. E introduced Daw Phyu to public libraries in Rangoon. Daw Phyu's father had a large collection of English and Burmese books of his own choice. However, she was never taken to a public library. In fact, her father did not even want his children to visit friends. Daw Phyu was allowed to visit her schoolmates only twice at the high school. The drivers who took Daw Phyu and her siblings to schools and evening schools also watched every step of Daw Phyu and her siblings.
When Daw Phyu went to the University, her family became very poor. They no longer had the luxury of being provided with free cars and drivers by the State. So her father had no choice but to allow her to use public transports for the first time. At the same time, her family was struggling to survive barely with her father's salary. Consequently, Daw Phyu had to work in the evenings and on weekends to support herself and her studies. She was a bit resentful that she had to work while her classmates were studying. She had been a bright science student at the High School; so she disliked being behind others at the University because she did not have enough time to study. To make matter worse, she was no longer studying physics or maths, her favourites subjects. She was struggling with English literature and other new subjects such as western philosophy, history, psychology, geography and economics taught in English. Then another blow struck her unexpectedly. She was diagnosed with a full-blown tuberculosis that she contracted in a summer camp just before she came to the University. She and her third brother whom she had infected with this disease were quarantined at home, missing more lecturers during her first year and second year at the University.
There were 28 classmates in her class; most were assertive and smart children of former diplomats, government ministers and very rich people. Daw Phyu became depressed among new friends who had nothing to do with her quiet social background. It was E and C, another Karen student who accepted Daw Phyu as their friends. They belong to Church of England. There was another Anglo-Burmese friend called M who was a Roman Catholic who became Daw Phyu's friend. E helped Daw Phyu with her studies. Daw Phyu and E became inseparable throughout her university days.
E's widowed father and brother worked for the government to support E whose mother died when she was eight. They were very poor because her father salary as a legal clerk at the High Court and her brother's salary as a military clerk were barely enough for them to survive. She was fiercely independent because she had been mostly left alone to defend herself from the very young age. Her brother and father had to go out to work to support her.
E's father was a theosophist and pacifist. E and her father took Daw Phyu to Insein seminary and many other theosophists' lectures and public libraries. Daw Phyu's father became increasingly uneasy to see his daughter's close friendship with Christians. He was worried that Daw Phyu would convert to become a Catholic or a Protestant. Ironically, what he had not realised was that Daw Phyu had silently lost her religion a long time before she met E, C and M. She just kept her atheism to herself in order not to upset her mother and friends. There were rows between Daw Phyu and her father regarding her religious outlook. Her father's busybody Buddhist monk unwisely got involved in this conflict which led to Daw Phyu's leaving her family a few years later.
While Daw Phyu was living with the Kachin, E visited her one day unexpectedly. She wanted Daw Phyu to persuade her father, Pa Pa, to cancel his peace mission to the rebel-controlled area. She was worried that her father would be torn apart by his brothers on the other side. At that time, Rangoon was hit by a few bombs. Railways lines between Pegu and Thaton were also bombed. Security was tight and travellers suffered delay and those who had Karen facial features were harassed at checkpoints. Daw Phyu and E tried to talk to her father who had already packed his rucksack for his peace mission. Then suddenly, he had a stroke and took months to die at the Rangoon General Hospital. After his death, E requested Daw Phyu to live with her at her house in the outskirts of Rangoon. She was too scared to live alone. Her brother was no longer living in Rangoon. Daw Phyu let her down in her need because she did not like to commute to her work daily in unreliable buses. And she liked living near the University with her new Kachin friends. Daw Phyu still feels guilty about this. E like her father wants peace in her birthplace, Thandaung. Now she is a retired civil servant and was last heard two years ago when she was planning to work for an NGO. Daw Phyu knows she is always preaching the gospel of peace like her father Pa Pa that Daw Phyu loved and respected so much.
For the last twenty-two years, there have been more displacement, destructions and loss of lives in countryside as well as in some areas of towns and cities. Daw Phyu hates wars and those celebrating war conquests.
Military conquests are celebrated with pomps and ceremonies by winners and "the good". At the same time, their own "collateral damages of wars" should be best forgotten and hidden if they could. Atrocities committed by losers and "the bad" must be recorded carefully for further witch-hunt of the perpetrators and their families in the conquered areas. Many say; our fighters are heroes; but theirs are war criminals. Some of our methods we use in our fight against our enemies save lives and therefore they are justifiable means to achieve the end _ "peace and our ideals". However, we must condemn the other side to use these methods. It is crude and inhumane to stab an enemy with a bayonet while it is viewed OK to press a button in a plane in safety high above to roast tens of thousands below. And we still need to keep our nuclear weapons!
Daw Phyu yearns for peace in Burma and in the whole world. She wants to live on a nuclear weapon free planet. She wants to shout and shout: "Please stop killing each other. Please stop killing animals and trees. Please stop killing the planet that we share with other life forms."
She also wants to scream at promoters and punters of these dogfights or cockfights between divided people; "Stop inciting wars and hatred between groups of different racial and religious origins. Ask all sides to stop fighting and arming themselves. And also please, please get rid of all nuclear weapons on the whole planet." However, she knows that these people will not listen.
Daw Phyu also wants to share the music that she love with others who feel the same about wars and conflicts.
Some of those reading this blog already know these composers and their works. So they are requested to forgive Daw Phyu for writing about music that they know. However, there may be some readers who still have not discovered them. And please also forgive Daw Phyu for her love for Wagner which she first heard when she was still a child of four if you find Wagner too German. Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart were German too. Music belongs to the whole mankind.
Here are the links which Daw Phyu hopes to work.
To sample Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg7sU5B_ibM
To sample Bach's Matthew Passion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_LLFfFXaUA
To sample Verdi's Nabucco III Chorus of the Hebrew Slave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjxncnQ6iLI
Elgar - Enigma (Nimrod) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE
Marlene War Protest Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3ET1b0ymZs
Stop the Calvary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zngTrdW-vio
War is Over: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etbucgvjhwo
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
ကုုလားပဲေက်ာ္အမ်ိုုုုးမ်ိဳး
ကုုလားပဲေက်ာ္
(ဘေလာ့ဂါရဲ သာမန္ အိမ္ခ်က္ အေတြ႕အၾကံဳမ်ားသာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သိပၺံနည္းက် ေလ့လာျပီး အခ်ိန္အဆမွန္မွန္ခ်က္နည္း ေရးထားတာ မဟုုတ္ပါ။) ျမန္မာ မိန္းကေလးတဦးက အကူအညီေတာင္းတဲ့အတြက္ ကိုုယ့္အေတြ႕အၾကံဳကိုု အျမန္ ေျပာျပထားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အခ်ိန္အဆကိုု ေသခ်ာစြာျပန္ေလ့လာျပီးသည့္အခါ ျပန္ျပင္ေပးပါ့မယ္။ အခုုေပးထားတာကေတာ့ အခ်က္အျပဳတ္ တတ္ျပီးသားသူမ်ားအတြက္ ျမန္ျမန္တင္ ေပးထားတာပါ။)
ေဒသအသီးသီးတြင္ စိုုက္ေသာ ပဲအမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး။
၁။ ျမန္မာျပည္စိုုက္ပဲ ... ဟင္းခ်က္ဖိုု႔ေရာ။ ေက်ာ္ဖိုု႔အတြက္ပါ အေကာင္းဆံုုးဘဲ။
၂။ အႏၵိယျပည္ကတင္ပိုု႔ေသာပဲ ... ျမန္မာပဲျဖစ္ဘိုု႔မ်ားတယ္။
၃။ အာဖရိကမွ တင္ပိုု႔လာတဲ့ပဲ ... ေက်ာ္ရင္ အလြန္မာေတာင္တယ္။ လံုုးဝမသံုုးပါနဲ႔။ သြားေတာင္ က်ိဳးႏုုိင္ပါတယ္။ (ဒါလြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၀ႏွစ္ အေတြ႕အၾကံဳပါ။ အခုု အာဖရိကပဲေတြ ေျမၾသဇာေၾကာင္း အမ်ိဳးဗီဇျပင္ထားတာေၾကာင္း ေကာင္းလွ်င္ ေတာ့ ေကာင္းျခင္ ေကာင္းႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။)
၄။ ဥေရာပမွာ စိုုက္တဲ့ပဲ ... ျမန္မာျပည္ကပဲထက္ ပိုုျပီးျပဳတ္ရင္ ျမန္ျမန္က်က္တယ္။ အရသာေတာ့ ျမန္မာျပည္ကပဲက ပိုုေကာင္းပါတယ္။
ဆီ
ေနၾကာဆီဟာ အေကာင္းဆံုုးပါ။ အဓိကလိုုအပ္တဲ့ အမႈံ႕ (ဂ်ံဳမႈံ႕/ဆန္မႈံ႕)ေတြမွာ ပဲမံႈ႕ ေရာမထဲ့လွ်င္၊ ေနၾကာဆီကိုု ပဲေက်ာ္က စုုတ္ယူတာ အလြန္နည္းပါတယ္။ ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ပဲေက်ာ္ ဆီအလြန္စုုတ္ပါတယ္။
ပါဝင္ေသာအဆာပလာ အခ်ိန္အဆ
ပဲ သာမန္အရြယ္တထုုတ္၊ အမႈံ႕ ထမင္းစားဇြန္း ငါးဇြန္းခန္႔၊ ေရေအး ေကာ္ဖီခြက္ တလံုုးခြဲခန္႕၊ ဆား အနည္းငယ္။ (ေရကိုုထဲ့သည့္အခါ သံုုးေသာအမံႈ႕ကိုု လိုုက္၍ သိပ္မပ်စ္ သိပ္မက်ဲေအာင္ ခ်ိန္ဆထဲ့ပါ။) ပထမဦးဆံုုး ေက်ာ္ေသာ ပဲေက်ာ္ႏွစ္ခုုခန္႕ သံုုးခုုခန္႔ကိုု ျမီးျပီး၊ ဆား အခ်ိန္အဆ ျပန္ျပင္ႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။ ဆားသိပ္မ်ားသြားရင္ေတာ့ အမႈံ႕ပိုုထဲ့ ေရပိုုထဲ့ျပီး ေက်ာ္ပါ။ ဆားငန္ေသာ္လည္း၊ ဆားေပါ့ေသာ မံုု႕ရည္ႏွင့္ စားလွ်င္ အဆင္ေျပပါတယ္။
ပဲေရစိမ္ပံုု
(က) ပဲကိုု တည အနည္းဆံုုးစိမ္။ ပဲကိုု ေရေအးနဲ႕ ေဆး၊ ျပီးတဲ့အခါ ဆားနဲ႕ ဂ်ံဳ၊ ဆန္၊ အမႈံ႕တမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးႏွင့္ ေရထဲ့ပါ။ အနည္းဆံုုး ၅ မိနစ္ေလာက္ထားျပီးမွ ေက်ာ္ပါ။
(ခ) (အျမန္နည္း) ပဲေရစိမ္ဘိုု႔ ေမ့ခဲ့ရင္၊ ပဲကိုု ၁၀ မိနစ္ ၂၀ မိနစ္ခန္႕ ျပဳတ္ပါ။ ျပီး ေရးေအးနဲ႔ ေဆးျပီး၊ အထက္ပါနည္းအတိုုင္း အဆာပလာေတြထဲ့ပါ။
ပဲေက်ာ္ပံုု
လွ်ပ္စစ္မီးဖိုုသံုုးလွ်င္ သံမဏိအိုုးျပားသံုုးရင္ ပိုုအဆင္ေျပတယ္။ အိုးျပား တဝက္နီးပါး ဆီထဲ့ပါ။ ဆီေကာင္းေကာင္း ပူရမယ္။ ပဲျပား တဖက္ကၽြတ္ရင္ ေနာက္တဖက္ကိုု ျပန္လွန္ေက်ာ္ရမယ္။ ျပီးရင္ အိုုးတလံုုးအေပၚမွာ တင္ထားတဲ့ ဇကာမွာ ပဲေက်ာ္ေရာ ဆီပါေလာင္း ခ် ျပီး၊ အိုုးထဲကဆီကိုု ျပန္ျပီး အိုုးျပားထဲ့ေလာင္းထဲ့ပါ။ ျပီးမွ ေနာက္ထပ္ပဲေတြထဲ့က်ာ္ပါ။ တဖက္ကၽြတ္ေအာင္ေစာင့္ေနစဥ္မွာ ဇကာထဲကပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု စကၠဴမွာျဖန္႔ အေအးခံျပီးမွ ဗူးထဲမွာ သိမ္းပါ။ ပဲမ်ားစြာေက်ာ္လွ်င္ ဆီထပ္ထဲ့ပါ။
အမံႈံ႕အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးသံုုးျခင္း။
၁။ ဂ်ံဳမႈံ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ..... ဒီပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု အၾကိဳက္ဆံုုးဘဲ။ အေက်ာ္က အေရာင္နီျပီးလွတယ္။ ေနာက္တေန႕ပဲေက်ာ္ေပ်ာ့သြားတာမ်ိဳး သိပ္မရွိလွဘူး။ ေပ်ာ့သြားရင္ မိုုက္ကရိုုေဝ့ဖ္အထဲမွာ ၁မိနစ္ ေလာက္ အပူေပး ျပန္ေက်ာ္တယ္။ ျပန္ထုုတ္လိုုက္ရင္ ေပ်ာ့ေနမယ္။ စိတ္မပူပါနဲ႕။ ပဲေက်ာ္ေပ်ာ့ကိုု စကၠဴရြက္ေပၚမွာ ျဖန္႔ျပီး အေအးခံလိုုက္ရင္ ျပန္ ကၽြတ္သြားတယ္။ မိုုက္ကရိုုေဝ့ဖ္ထဲမွ ၾကာၾကာ အပူေပးရင္ တူးသြားမွာကိုု သတိထားပါ။
၂။ ဆန္မႈံ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ...... ဒီပဲေက်ာ္လည္း မဆိုုးပါဘူး။ သိပ္ျပီး နီရဲေအာင္ မေက်ာ္ပါနဲ႕။ ပဲေက်ာ္ အဝါေရာင္ သန္းရင္ ဆယ္ပါ။
၃။ ဂ်ံုုဳမႈံ႕၊ ပဲမႈံ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ...... အရသာပိုုရွိတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ႔ ပဲမံႈ႕ေၾကာင့္ ေက်ာ္ျပီး ၾကာၾကာထားရင္ ေပ်ာ့ေစတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့လည္း မိုုက္ကရုုိေဝ့ဖ္မွာ ျပန္ကၽြတ္ေအာင္ လုုပ္ႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။ (ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ဆီပိုုကုုန္ျပီး ပဲေက်ာ္မွာ ဆီမ်ားတဲ့အတြက္ က်မ္းမာေရးအတြက္ မေကာင္းပါ။)
၄။ ဆန္မံႈ႔၊ ပဲမႈံ႔၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ... အထက္ပါအတိုုင္းဘဲ။ (ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ဆီပိုုကုုန္ျပီး ပဲေက်ာ္မွာ ဆီမ်ားတဲ့အတြက္ က်မ္းမာေရးအတြက္ မေကာင္းပါ။)
၅။ ဆန္မႈံ႕၊ ဂ်ံဳမႈံ႕။ ပဲမံႈ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ...... အမႈံ႔ သံုုးမ်ိဳးလံုုးသံုုးေတာ့ အရသာေကာင္းတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ဘူးသီးေက်ာ္သယ္တခ်ိဳ႕ ဒါကိုု သံုုးတယ္လိုု႕ ၾကားဘူးတယ္။ (ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ဆီပိုုကုုန္ျပီး ပဲေက်ာ္မွာ ဆီမ်ားတဲ့အတြက္ က်မ္းမာေရးအတြက္ မေကာင္းပါ။)
ပဲေက်ာ္ၾကာရွည္ထားျခင္းႏွင့္ ပဲေက်ာ္ေျပာ့မ်ားကိုု ျပန္ကၽြတ္ရြေအာင္လုုပ္နည္း၊ ပဲေက်ာ္မာစားနည္း။
ပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု ေအးမွ ဘူးထဲထည့္ သိုုေလွာင္ပါ။
ပဲေက်ာ္ မာေတာင္ေနလွ်င္ ဟင္းရည္ပူပူထဲထဲ့လိုုက္ပါက မာေတာင္တာေလ်ာ့သြားျပီး စားလိုု႔ရေအာင္ ျပန္ကၽြတ္ရြလာတယ္။
ဆားမ်ားတဲ့ ပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု ဆားငံနည္းသည့္ မံုုးဟင္းခါး/အုုန္းႏိုု႕ေခါက္ဆြဲ ဟင္းရည္ႏွင့္စားႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။
(ဘေလာ့ဂါရဲ သာမန္ အိမ္ခ်က္ အေတြ႕အၾကံဳမ်ားသာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သိပၺံနည္းက် ေလ့လာျပီး အခ်ိန္အဆမွန္မွန္ခ်က္နည္း ေရးထားတာ မဟုုတ္ပါ။) ျမန္မာ မိန္းကေလးတဦးက အကူအညီေတာင္းတဲ့အတြက္ ကိုုယ့္အေတြ႕အၾကံဳကိုု အျမန္ ေျပာျပထားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အခ်ိန္အဆကိုု ေသခ်ာစြာျပန္ေလ့လာျပီးသည့္အခါ ျပန္ျပင္ေပးပါ့မယ္။ အခုုေပးထားတာကေတာ့ အခ်က္အျပဳတ္ တတ္ျပီးသားသူမ်ားအတြက္ ျမန္ျမန္တင္ ေပးထားတာပါ။)
ေဒသအသီးသီးတြင္ စိုုက္ေသာ ပဲအမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး။
၁။ ျမန္မာျပည္စိုုက္ပဲ ... ဟင္းခ်က္ဖိုု႔ေရာ။ ေက်ာ္ဖိုု႔အတြက္ပါ အေကာင္းဆံုုးဘဲ။
၂။ အႏၵိယျပည္ကတင္ပိုု႔ေသာပဲ ... ျမန္မာပဲျဖစ္ဘိုု႔မ်ားတယ္။
၃။ အာဖရိကမွ တင္ပိုု႔လာတဲ့ပဲ ... ေက်ာ္ရင္ အလြန္မာေတာင္တယ္။ လံုုးဝမသံုုးပါနဲ႔။ သြားေတာင္ က်ိဳးႏုုိင္ပါတယ္။ (ဒါလြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၀ႏွစ္ အေတြ႕အၾကံဳပါ။ အခုု အာဖရိကပဲေတြ ေျမၾသဇာေၾကာင္း အမ်ိဳးဗီဇျပင္ထားတာေၾကာင္း ေကာင္းလွ်င္ ေတာ့ ေကာင္းျခင္ ေကာင္းႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။)
၄။ ဥေရာပမွာ စိုုက္တဲ့ပဲ ... ျမန္မာျပည္ကပဲထက္ ပိုုျပီးျပဳတ္ရင္ ျမန္ျမန္က်က္တယ္။ အရသာေတာ့ ျမန္မာျပည္ကပဲက ပိုုေကာင္းပါတယ္။
ဆီ
ေနၾကာဆီဟာ အေကာင္းဆံုုးပါ။ အဓိကလိုုအပ္တဲ့ အမႈံ႕ (ဂ်ံဳမႈံ႕/ဆန္မႈံ႕)ေတြမွာ ပဲမံႈ႕ ေရာမထဲ့လွ်င္၊ ေနၾကာဆီကိုု ပဲေက်ာ္က စုုတ္ယူတာ အလြန္နည္းပါတယ္။ ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ပဲေက်ာ္ ဆီအလြန္စုုတ္ပါတယ္။
ပါဝင္ေသာအဆာပလာ အခ်ိန္အဆ
ပဲ သာမန္အရြယ္တထုုတ္၊ အမႈံ႕ ထမင္းစားဇြန္း ငါးဇြန္းခန္႔၊ ေရေအး ေကာ္ဖီခြက္ တလံုုးခြဲခန္႕၊ ဆား အနည္းငယ္။ (ေရကိုုထဲ့သည့္အခါ သံုုးေသာအမံႈ႕ကိုု လိုုက္၍ သိပ္မပ်စ္ သိပ္မက်ဲေအာင္ ခ်ိန္ဆထဲ့ပါ။) ပထမဦးဆံုုး ေက်ာ္ေသာ ပဲေက်ာ္ႏွစ္ခုုခန္႕ သံုုးခုုခန္႔ကိုု ျမီးျပီး၊ ဆား အခ်ိန္အဆ ျပန္ျပင္ႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။ ဆားသိပ္မ်ားသြားရင္ေတာ့ အမႈံ႕ပိုုထဲ့ ေရပိုုထဲ့ျပီး ေက်ာ္ပါ။ ဆားငန္ေသာ္လည္း၊ ဆားေပါ့ေသာ မံုု႕ရည္ႏွင့္ စားလွ်င္ အဆင္ေျပပါတယ္။
ပဲေရစိမ္ပံုု
(က) ပဲကိုု တည အနည္းဆံုုးစိမ္။ ပဲကိုု ေရေအးနဲ႕ ေဆး၊ ျပီးတဲ့အခါ ဆားနဲ႕ ဂ်ံဳ၊ ဆန္၊ အမႈံ႕တမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးႏွင့္ ေရထဲ့ပါ။ အနည္းဆံုုး ၅ မိနစ္ေလာက္ထားျပီးမွ ေက်ာ္ပါ။
(ခ) (အျမန္နည္း) ပဲေရစိမ္ဘိုု႔ ေမ့ခဲ့ရင္၊ ပဲကိုု ၁၀ မိနစ္ ၂၀ မိနစ္ခန္႕ ျပဳတ္ပါ။ ျပီး ေရးေအးနဲ႔ ေဆးျပီး၊ အထက္ပါနည္းအတိုုင္း အဆာပလာေတြထဲ့ပါ။
ပဲေက်ာ္ပံုု
လွ်ပ္စစ္မီးဖိုုသံုုးလွ်င္ သံမဏိအိုုးျပားသံုုးရင္ ပိုုအဆင္ေျပတယ္။ အိုးျပား တဝက္နီးပါး ဆီထဲ့ပါ။ ဆီေကာင္းေကာင္း ပူရမယ္။ ပဲျပား တဖက္ကၽြတ္ရင္ ေနာက္တဖက္ကိုု ျပန္လွန္ေက်ာ္ရမယ္။ ျပီးရင္ အိုုးတလံုုးအေပၚမွာ တင္ထားတဲ့ ဇကာမွာ ပဲေက်ာ္ေရာ ဆီပါေလာင္း ခ် ျပီး၊ အိုုးထဲကဆီကိုု ျပန္ျပီး အိုုးျပားထဲ့ေလာင္းထဲ့ပါ။ ျပီးမွ ေနာက္ထပ္ပဲေတြထဲ့က်ာ္ပါ။ တဖက္ကၽြတ္ေအာင္ေစာင့္ေနစဥ္မွာ ဇကာထဲကပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု စကၠဴမွာျဖန္႔ အေအးခံျပီးမွ ဗူးထဲမွာ သိမ္းပါ။ ပဲမ်ားစြာေက်ာ္လွ်င္ ဆီထပ္ထဲ့ပါ။
အမံႈံ႕အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးသံုုးျခင္း။
၁။ ဂ်ံဳမႈံ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ..... ဒီပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု အၾကိဳက္ဆံုုးဘဲ။ အေက်ာ္က အေရာင္နီျပီးလွတယ္။ ေနာက္တေန႕ပဲေက်ာ္ေပ်ာ့သြားတာမ်ိဳး သိပ္မရွိလွဘူး။ ေပ်ာ့သြားရင္ မိုုက္ကရိုုေဝ့ဖ္အထဲမွာ ၁မိနစ္ ေလာက္ အပူေပး ျပန္ေက်ာ္တယ္။ ျပန္ထုုတ္လိုုက္ရင္ ေပ်ာ့ေနမယ္။ စိတ္မပူပါနဲ႕။ ပဲေက်ာ္ေပ်ာ့ကိုု စကၠဴရြက္ေပၚမွာ ျဖန္႔ျပီး အေအးခံလိုုက္ရင္ ျပန္ ကၽြတ္သြားတယ္။ မိုုက္ကရိုုေဝ့ဖ္ထဲမွ ၾကာၾကာ အပူေပးရင္ တူးသြားမွာကိုု သတိထားပါ။
၂။ ဆန္မႈံ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ...... ဒီပဲေက်ာ္လည္း မဆိုုးပါဘူး။ သိပ္ျပီး နီရဲေအာင္ မေက်ာ္ပါနဲ႕။ ပဲေက်ာ္ အဝါေရာင္ သန္းရင္ ဆယ္ပါ။
၃။ ဂ်ံုုဳမႈံ႕၊ ပဲမႈံ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ...... အရသာပိုုရွိတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ႔ ပဲမံႈ႕ေၾကာင့္ ေက်ာ္ျပီး ၾကာၾကာထားရင္ ေပ်ာ့ေစတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့လည္း မိုုက္ကရုုိေဝ့ဖ္မွာ ျပန္ကၽြတ္ေအာင္ လုုပ္ႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။ (ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ဆီပိုုကုုန္ျပီး ပဲေက်ာ္မွာ ဆီမ်ားတဲ့အတြက္ က်မ္းမာေရးအတြက္ မေကာင္းပါ။)
၄။ ဆန္မံႈ႔၊ ပဲမႈံ႔၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ... အထက္ပါအတိုုင္းဘဲ။ (ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ဆီပိုုကုုန္ျပီး ပဲေက်ာ္မွာ ဆီမ်ားတဲ့အတြက္ က်မ္းမာေရးအတြက္ မေကာင္းပါ။)
၅။ ဆန္မႈံ႕၊ ဂ်ံဳမႈံ႕။ ပဲမံႈ႕၊ ဆား၊ ပဲ၊ ေရ ...... အမႈံ႔ သံုုးမ်ိဳးလံုုးသံုုးေတာ့ အရသာေကာင္းတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ဘူးသီးေက်ာ္သယ္တခ်ိဳ႕ ဒါကိုု သံုုးတယ္လိုု႕ ၾကားဘူးတယ္။ (ပဲမႈံ႕သံုုးလွ်င္ ဆီပိုုကုုန္ျပီး ပဲေက်ာ္မွာ ဆီမ်ားတဲ့အတြက္ က်မ္းမာေရးအတြက္ မေကာင္းပါ။)
ပဲေက်ာ္ၾကာရွည္ထားျခင္းႏွင့္ ပဲေက်ာ္ေျပာ့မ်ားကိုု ျပန္ကၽြတ္ရြေအာင္လုုပ္နည္း၊ ပဲေက်ာ္မာစားနည္း။
ပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု ေအးမွ ဘူးထဲထည့္ သိုုေလွာင္ပါ။
ပဲေက်ာ္ မာေတာင္ေနလွ်င္ ဟင္းရည္ပူပူထဲထဲ့လိုုက္ပါက မာေတာင္တာေလ်ာ့သြားျပီး စားလိုု႔ရေအာင္ ျပန္ကၽြတ္ရြလာတယ္။
ဆားမ်ားတဲ့ ပဲေက်ာ္ကိုု ဆားငံနည္းသည့္ မံုုးဟင္းခါး/အုုန္းႏိုု႕ေခါက္ဆြဲ ဟင္းရည္ႏွင့္စားႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Pretension
Some Burmese sages imply that pretension is a characteristic of a human being and that lack of pretension is a marked trait of animals. People who do not pretend are like animals, so they say. Believers of some religions think that animals are created as food sources or beasts of burden for human beings. Others believe that some bad human beings are destined to be reborn as animals. When Daw Phyu was four years old, she was convinced that she could be reborn as a farm cow to work for her debtors if she did not pay back all what she owed or all what she had borrowed. Like many, Daw Phyu used to think that animals have no intelligence, no rational facilities, so emotion, no culture and worse of all no regards for any social taboos (because males have sexual intercourses with their close relatives).
Thanks to the words of these sages regarding the concept of “pretension”, Daw Phyu has been thinking a lot about her own duplicity as a human trait. She has been frank with some people whom she wants to hurt deliberately. That is very naughty of her and she knows that. On these occasions, she boasts that she cannot tell lies. Yet, she has knowingly told so many lies, including this and even rather outrageous ones on many occasions. She has frequently hidden herself behind a motley of facemasks while silently laughing at those who were unable to see even her exposed eyes. On many occasions, she cowardly claimed to have no knowledge of some facts when questioned in order to avoid complication. Here, in contradiction to her tendency to be frank to those whom she likes to hurt, she describe her deceptive skills as desirable social skills, a clever use of diplomacy, discretion or simple tact. Yet she does not want to be viewed as being deceitful or dishonest or scheming. Most of all, she does not want herself to be called a criminal, a liar, a cheat, a swindler, a fake, a counterfeiter, a bogus or a sham. Well, still then, she knows what she is up to all the time. She is full of twists and turns although she says she is not proud of herself. She says, like the others, she is only a human being after all.
Intelligence, emotion, complex social rules and something like pretension are not unique to human beings. Animals are now known to possess them. Yes, they do pretend. Male insects of some species pretend to be females so that they could take the offerings from other males in exchange for sex from females. Some animals pretend to be dead when they face being attacked. Some birds, which normally paired for life are now known to cheat on their lifelong partners.
The word “pretence” or “pretension” has many connotations: “representation”, “acting”, “imitating”, “mimicking”, “aping”, “copying”, “faking”, “lying” and “cheating”.
On many shameful occasions, Daw Phyu pretends to be cleverer than she is. That is what she is doing precisely at the moment _ writing this blog to impress the others with what little she knows! However she cannot plagiarize other works and pretend that these brilliant masterpieces are hers. This is unlawful. She may like to act the role of a policewoman in film and on a stage if she is paid a million dollar. This is acting. However, she could not imagine herself to pretend to be a policewoman with an intention to deceive someone even if she were paid several millions by a criminal syndicate; that (impersonation) is a statutory offence under all national laws and a forbidden act under the natural law. Some acts of pretension are relatively less harmful and less evil; but some are harmful, evil and most importantly unlawful. At the same time, Daw Phyu has reached a conclusion that she cannot attack people who do not want to pretend at all and she cannot label them simply as “animals” in the sense that they are sub-human beings.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
ေျပာက္ က်ားတပ္သား (၂)
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| 10 November 2008 |
ဒီဇင္ဘာလ အထိကေတာ့ ကေလးငယ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္ အားတက္တေရာ လာအကူအညီေပးၾကပါတယ္။ ေဒၚျဖဴ ကေလးေတြအတြက္ မံုု႕မ်ား လဖက္ရည္မ်ားယူလာေပးေတာ့ ကေလးေတြကလည္း သေဘာက်ပါ့။
ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁၃ရက္ေန႕မွာ ဥယာဥ္မႈး ေျပာက္က်ားတပ္သား ေဒၚျဖဴ မိခင္ ၉ ရက္ေန႕က ဆံုုးေၾကာင္း သိလိုုက္ရပါတယ္။ ေန႔စဥ္ အပင္မ်ား၊ ေျမေဆြးမ်ား၊ အိုုးၾကီးမ်ား သြားဝယ္လိုုက္၊ ေလွကားမွ ေျမေဆြး အထုုတ္ၾကီးမ်ား သယ္ယူခ်လိုုက္၊ စိုုက္လိုုက္ ေရေလာင္းလိုုက္ အမိႈက္လႈဲလိုုက္ ႏွင့္ ဆံုုးသြားေသာမိခင္ၾကီရဲ႕ မ်က္ႏွာကိုု ျမင္ေယာင္ တမ္းတေနခဲ့ပါတယ္။
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| 10 November 2008 |
ခြာညိဳပန္းအမ်ိဳး (clematis) ၂၀ ေလာက္ကိုု ေဒၚျဖဴဝရန္တာမွာ စိုုက္ခဲ့တာ အႏွစ္ ၂၀ ခန္႕ရွိပါျပီ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ တခါမွ် မျမင္ခဲ့ဘူးပါ။ စာေတြ၊ ကဗ်ာေတြမွာေတာ့ ဒီပန္းအမည္ မၾကာခဏေတြ႕ခဲ့ရျပီ ေတာပန္းလိုု႕ဘဲ ထင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အခုုပိုုဒီယမ္ၾကီးမွာ အမ်ိဳး ရာေက်ာ္ေအာင္ စိုုက္ဖိုု႔ စီမံကိန္းခ်ထားပါတယ္။ ႏယ္ပင္ျဖစ္ျပီး အမ်ားစုုက ေဆာင္းတြင္ ရြက္ေၾတြက်တဲ့အတြက္ ေျခာက္ေသြ႕ ပိန္လွီ ေသေနသည့္ပံုုစံရွိလိုု႕ ၾကည့္မေကာင္းတဲ့အတြက္ အျမဲစိမ္းပင္မ်ားၾကား ညွပ္စိုုက္ရပါတယ္။ နွင္းက်တဲ ႏိုုဝင္ဘာ မွ ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီအထိ ပြင့္တဲ့ ခြာညိဳမိ်ဳး၊ ေဖေေဖာ္ဝါရီမွ မတ္လအထိပြင့္တဲ့ ခြာညိဳမ်ိဳး၊ ေႏြ ဦးပြင့္တဲ့ခြာညိဳ၊ ေႏြလယ္ပြင့္တဲ့ ခြာညိဳ၊ ေႏြ ေနွာင္းပြင့္တဲ့ခြာညိဳ နဲ႕ ေဆာင္းဦးပြင့္တဲ့ ခြာညိဳအားလံုုးစိုုက္ရမယ္။ ဒါမွ ၁၂ ရာသီလံုုး ပန္းျခံၾကီးမွာ ပန္းမျပတ္မွာပါ။
စာအုုပ္စင္မွာ ကမၻာအရပ္ရပ္က သစ္ပင္ ပန္းပင္ ေဆးေရာင္စံုု ႐ုုပ္စံုု စာအုုပ္ ၁၀၀ ေလာက္ကိုု အျမဲဖတ္လိုုက္၊အင္တာနက္မွာ ရွာလိုုက္၊ ေအာ္ဒါမွာလိုုက္နဲ႕လည္း ေတာ္ေတာ္ အလုုပ္႐ႈပ္ရတယ္။ သာမန္ပန္းပင္ သစ္ပင္ေတြကိုု ဆိုုင္ေတြမွာ ဝယ္နွိင္ေသာ္လည္း ရွားပါတဲ့ အပူပိုုင္း အပင္ေတြကိုုေတာ့ အင္တာနက္ဘဲ အားကိုုးရေတာ့တယ္။ မီးဖိုုေခ်ာင္မွာ တ႐ုုပ္တန္းက ဝယ္တဲ့ မန္က်ဥ္းထုုတ္ထဲက အေစ့နဲ႕စိုုက္ထားတဲ့ မန္က်ဥ္းပင္ၾကီးက မ်က္ႏွာက်က္ေတာင္ထိေနျပီး၊ ျမန္မာ တထပ္ပြင့္စပါယ္ပင္ကိုုေတာ့ ပန္ျခံၾကီးမွာဘဲ ေျပာင္းစိုုက္ထားလိုုက္တယ္။ ၂၀၀၉ ခုုႏွစ္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုုႏွစ္မွာ ေရခဲေခတ္ ေခတၱ အင္ဂၤလန္မွာ က်ေရာက္ခဲ့တာေတာင္ မေသဘဲ။ ၂၀၁၀ ၾသဂုုတ္လ ၂၉ ရက္ေန႕မွာ စပါယ္တပြင့္ေတာင္ ပြင့္ခဲ့ပါ့။
၂၀၀၇ ခုုႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႕မွာ ပန္းသီးပင္မ်ား ဝယ္ျပီးစိုုက္ခဲ့ရာ ကိုုင္းတခုုက ဘယ္မ်က္လံုုးကိုု ထိုုးမိခဲ့ရာ နွစ္ရက္ခန္႕အၾကာတြင္ အနာဝင္ျပီး မ်က္စိႏွစ္ဘက္စလံုုး ေရာင္ကိုုင္း မ်က္ရည္တြင္တြင္ က်လာသျဖင့္ အေရးေပၚမွာ သြားကုုသရပါတယ္။ တလေလာက္အထိ မ်က္ေစ့ေဆးထဲ့ရျပီး နွစ္ပတ္ေလာက္ မ်က္စိအလြန္နာ ေကာင္းေကာင္း မျမင္ခဲ့ရပါ။ ႏွစ္သစ္ကိုု မ်က္စိနာႏွင့္သာ ကူးခဲ့ရပါေတာ့တယ္။ ဘယ္သူမွလည္း ကိုုယ္ကိုု ပန္းပင္းမစိုုက္ရလိုု႔ ေျမမက်ဴးေက်ာ္ရလိုု႕ လာမတားေသး၊ ျပီး ေမွာင္မဲတဲ့ ဇႏၷဝါရီလၾကီးမွာ ပန္းျခံၾကီးမွာ စိမ္းစိမ္းလန္းလန္းရွိေနမွာကိုုေတာ့ မ်က္စိေကာင္းစြာမျမင္ေပမဲ့လည္း သိေနရလိုု႔ ႏွစ္သစ္မွာ ေဒၚျဖဴတေယာက္ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလး ေပ်ာ္ေနခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ႏိုုဝင္ဘာလ ေလာက္ကစျပီး ေရ ေန႕စဥ္ ေလာင္းစရာ မလိုုခဲ့ပါ။ မိုုးက မွန္မွရြာျပီ၊ ေအးတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ တစ္ပတ္ တခါႏွစ္ခါသာ ေလာင္းရပါတယ္။ မိုုးေရကိုု အမိႈက္ပံုုးၾကီးမ်ားႏွင့္ ေျမာက္ဘက္ရွိ အေဆာက္အဦ အမိုုးစြန္မ်ားေအာက္ တြင္ခံရပါတယ္။ သိုု႕ေသာ္ ေႏြရာသီမွာ မိုုးေခါင္လွ်င္ ဘာလုုပ္ရမည္ မသိပါ။
၂၀၀၈ခုုႏွစ္ ဇႏၷဝါရီလလည္ ေလာက္မွာ ၃ နာရီခြဲေလာက္ဆိုု ေနဝင္မွာမိုု႔၊ ပန္းျခံထဲကိုု ညေန ၂နာ ရီေလာက္မွာ ဆင္းသြားတယ္။ အထြက္ေပါက္ဖြင့္လိုုက္သည့္ အခါ ေျမေခြးနီတစ္ေကာင္ကိုု အမိုုးေပၚမွာ ေတြ႕လိုုက္ရပါတယ္။ ေဒၚျဖဴကိုု ေတြ႕ေတာ့ လန္႕ျပီး ေျမေခြး အမိုုးၾကီးေပၚမွာ ေဝ့လည္ ပတ္ေျပးေတာ့တာဘဲ။ ေဒၚျဖဴလည္း ေျမေခြးကိုု ႐ုုတ္တရက္ၾကည့္ျပီး အိမ္ေပၚျပန္ေျပးတက္ျပီး တရိစၱာန္ ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ေရွာက္ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး အဖြဲ႕ကိုု ဖံုုဆက္ ေခၚပါေတာ့တယ္။ ဘယ္သူမ်ား ေပါက္ေပါက္ရွာရွာ ေျမေခြးကိုု ဘယ္ကဖမ္းျပီး ဒီလိုုလင္းေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ၊ အမိုုးေပၚတင္သလည္း မသိဟုု ေတြးမိပါတယ္။
ထပ္မံေရးသားပါမည္။
Sunday, 29 August 2010
ေျပာက္ က်ား တပ္သား (၁)
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| November 2007 |
အေနာက္ ဆိုုဟုုိမွာ ေဒၚျဖဴ ေနလာသည္မွာ ၁၇ ေက်ာ္ခဲ့ပါျပီ။ သိုု႕ေသာ္လည္း ၂၀၀၂ မတိုုင္မွီက ထိုုအမိုုးၾကီးအေပၚသိုု႕ သံုုးခါေလာက္ဘဲ တက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေဒၚျဖဴေနတဲ့ ၇ ထပ္မွ ဓတ္ေလွခါးျဖင့္ ၃ ထပ္ကိုု ဆင္းရပါတယ္။ ျပီး အေနာက္ဖက္ ေလွခါးမွာ ေလွခါး နွစ္ခုုကိုု ပတ္ဆင္းျပီးမွ ထိုုအမိုုးေပၚသိုု႔ ေရာက္ရွိႏိုုင္ပါတယ္။
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| November 2007 |
၂၀၀၂ ခုုႏွစ္ ႏိုုင္ဝင္ဘာလမွာ ေဒၚျဖဴ ဘယ္ေျခေထာက္ ႐ုုတ္တရက္ မစြမ္းမသန္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ အလုုပ္ကလည္း ပါးေနတဲ့ အခ်ိန္ျဖစ္လိုု႔ လမ္းျပန္ေလွ်ာက္ႏိုုင္ရန္အတြက္ အိမ္ခန္းအတြင္းတြင္ ေျခေလ့က်င့္ခန္း ပထမ စလုုပ္ရပါတယ္။ နည္းနည္း ေျခသန္လာသည့္အခါမွ၊ ဘုုရင္မၾကီးရဲ႕ ရီးဂ်င့္ပန္းျခံၾကီးမွာ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ရပါတယ္။ သိုု႔ေသာ္ တေယာက္ထဲ လမ္းျဖတ္ကူးရာမွာ အႏၱရယ္မ်ားတဲ့အတြက္၊ အေနာက္ေလွခါးကိုု ခက္ခက္ခဲခဲ တြယ္ဖက္ဆင္းျပီး အမိုုးၾကီးေပၚမွာ ေျချပန္သန္ေအာင္ ေလ့က်င့္ခန္းလုုပ္ရပါတယ္။ ဥေဏွာက္ကိုုလည္း ေရွ႕ေလွွ်ာက္ျခင္း ေနာက္ေလွ်ာက္ျခင္း၊ ေဘးတုုိက္ေလွွ်ာက္ျခင္းမ်ားကိုု ျပန္သင္ေပးေနရပါတယ္။
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| November 2007 |
ေျချပန္သန္လာေသာအခါ ေနသာသည့္အခါတိုုင္း အလုုပ္မရွိသည့္ေန႔တိုုင္း ေဒၚျဖဴ ထိုုအမိုုးေပၚတြင္ ပက္လက္ထိုုင္တခုုျဖင့္ စာဖတ္ေလ့ရွိပါတယ္။ အမိုုးၾကီးသိုု႕ မည္သူမွ်ဆင္းလာသည္ကိုု တခါမွ် မေတြ႕ခဲ့ရပါ။
ဒီလိုုနဲ႔ ၂၀၀၇ ခုုႏွစ္ ဇူလိုုင္လထဲေရာက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ထိုုအခ်ိန္မွာ အဂၤလန္ ေဒသအသီးသီးတြင္ မိုုးမ်ားသည့္အတြက္ ျမိဳ႕ အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ေရၾကီးဒဏ္ခံ စားေနရွာပါတယ္။
လန္ဒန္မွာလည္း ေန႔စဥ္နီးပါး မိုုးရြာေနသျဖင့္ ေဒၚျဖဴ အမိုုးၾကီးေပၚမွာ စာမဖတ္ႏိုုင္ပါ။ ပ်ံက်အလုုပ္မ်ားကလည္း နားထားသျဖင့္ ေဒၚေငြပန္းျဖဴမွာ အခန္းထဲေန႔စဥ္ေအာင္းျပီး တီဗြီသတင္းမ်ားကိုုသာ တြင္တြင္ၾကည့္ေနရပါတယ္။
ျပီး ေရဒီယိုုနားေထာင္လိုုက္၊ ထမင္းဆာလွ်င္ သီခ်င္းစီဒီ တခုုျပီးတခုုဖြင့္ျပီး ထမင္းခ်က္စားလိုုက္၊ ပန္းကန္ေဆးလိုုက္၊ အိမ္ရွင္းလိုုက္၊ စာဖတ္လိုုက္၊ ကြန္ျပဴတာဖြင့္ အင္တာနက္ေပၚ ရွာေဖြဖတ္႐ႈလိုုက္၊ ေရဒီယိုုနားေထာင္လိုုက္၊ ေဒတာေဘ့စ္တြင္ ကိုုယ္စုုေဆာင္းျခင္းရာ ရွာေဖြစုုေဆာင္းလိုုက္ႏွင့္ တေယာက္ထဲ ဗလခ်ာလိုုက္ေနပါတယ္။
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| November 2007 |
တေန႔ မိုုးပါးသြားတဲ့အတြက္ အမိုုးေပၚသြားၾကည့္မိပါတယ္။ အမိုုးေအာက္ရွိ ထမင္းဆိုုင္ႏွင့္ ႐ံုုးမ်ားကိုု ေပးသည့္ေရမ်ား သိုုေလွာင္တဲ့ ေရေလွာင္ကန္ႏွစ္ခုုထားရာ အုုတ္တိုုက္ေသးေသး ႏွစ္လံုုး ရွိေနပါတယ္။ ထုုိေရေလွာင္ကန္အုုတ္တုုိက္ႏွစ္လံုုး၏ အမိုုးျပန္႔မ်ား၏ အနားစြန္မ်ားတြင္ အုုပ္ျဖင့္ ဝိုုင္းစီကြတ္ထားပါတယ္။ အေနာက္ဖက္ အုုတ္တိုုက္အမိုုးမွာ ေရက်ေပါက္ပိတ္ေနသျဖင့္ ေရကန္ျဖစ္ေနသည္ကိုု ေတြ႔လိုုက္ရပါတယ္။ ေဒၚျဖဴ အလြန္ဝမ္းသာသြားပါတယ္။
ေနာက္တေန႕ ေဒၚျဖဴ ဝရန္တာမွာ မိုုးေရၾကိဳက္ ပန္းပင္အခ်ိဳ႔ကိုု အမိုုးၾကီးရွိရာသိုု႔ သယ္ခ်လာပါတယ္။ ထံုုးဓတ္မ်ားတဲ့ ေရပိုုက္မွ ေရကိုု မၾကိဳက္တဲ့ ပန္းပင္မ်ားအတြက္ နည္းအမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးနဲ႕ ဝရန္တာမွာ၊ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၁၄ နွစ္ေက်ာ္ ေဒၚျဖဴ မိုုးေရကိုု ခံယူဖိုု႔ၾကိဳးစားခဲ့ရတယ္။ ဝရန္တာက မိုုးလံုုေဆာက္ထားေတာ့ အလုုပ္သိပ္မျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါ။ ႏြယ္သာကီပန္းပင္မ်ား၊ နန္းလံုးၾကိဳင္ပန္းပင္မ်ား၊ လဖက္ပင္တပင္ႏွင့္ လဖက္မ်ိဳးဝင္ ကမဲလီးယားပန္းပင္မ်ား အတြက၊္ ေဒၚျဖဴဝရန္တာမွာ အရြယ္မလြန္ခင္ ေခါင္းခ်ရာ ေနရာျဖစ္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
လန္ဒန္ျမိဳ႕လယ္ရွိရာ ေအာ့စဖိုု႔လမ္း၊ ရီးဂ်င့္လမ္း၊ တရုုတ္တန္းမ်ား အနီးအနားတဝိုုက္မွာ လူမ်ား ပန္းျခံစိုုက္ရန္ ေျမလြတ္လံုုးဝမရွိ၊ ဒီေလာက္ၾကီးမားတဲ့ အမိုုးၾကီးလိုုေနရာ ဝယ္လိုုလွ်င္လည္း သန္းေပါင္းေထာင္ႏွင့္ခ်ီေပးရမွာဘဲ။ ေဒၚျဖဴမွာလည္း အိမ္လည္း မဝယ္ႏိုုင္၊ ျခံလည္းမဝယ္ႏိုုင္သူတဦးပါ။ စားႏိုုင္ေသာက္ႏိုုင္႐ံုုရွိျပီး အိမ္လခမွန္မွန္ေပးႏိုုင္႐ံုုပါ။ သစ္ပင္ ႏွင့္ ေက်းငွက္သတၱဝါမ်ား အလြန္ခ်စ္သူျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ပန္းပင္က်ဴးေက်ာ္စိုုက္သူ ေပ်ာက္ၾကားတပ္သား ဥယဥ္မႈးတဦးအေနျဖင့္၊ ဒီအမိုုးၾကီးကိုု အမ်ားပိုုင္ပန္းျခံအသြင္အျဖစ္ ေျပာင္းရန္ ေဒၚျဖဴ စဥ္းစားမိပါတယ္။ ေဒၚျဖဴ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းအခ်ိဳ႕မွာလည္း အလြန္ဆင္းရဲၾကပါတယ္။ ကိုုယ္ဝရန္တာမွာေတာင္ ပန္းပင္ဝယ္စိုုက္ရန္ မတတ္ႏိုုင္သူမ်ားၾကပါတယ္။ တီဗြီလိုုင္စင္ မတတ္ႏိုု္င္လိုု႔ တီဗြီမရွိသူေတြ တပံုုၾကီး၊ တီဗြီလိုုင္စင္ကိုု အသက္ ၇၅ ႏွစ္ျပည့္မွသာ အခမဲ့ရရွိၾကပါတယ္။ တခ်ိဳ႕မွာ ေငြမရွိလုုိ႔ အိမ္ထဲမွာဘဲ ကုုတ္ေနၾကရတယ္။ တခ်ဳိ႕မွာ အရက္သမား၊ တခ်ိဳ႕မွာ ေဆးေျခာက္သမား၊ အစိုုးရအေထာက္အပံ့ကိုု တသက္လံုုးယူေနတူေတြလည္းရွိပါ့။ တခ်ိဳ႕ကေတာ့ တကယ္ဘဲမစြမ္းမသန္သူေတြ၊ ေရာဂါၾကီးၾကီးမားရွိသူ၊ အိုုမင္းမစြမ္းရွိသူ၊ စိတ္ပိုုင္းဆိုုင္ရာ ခ်ိဳ႕တဲ့တဲ့သူေတြရွိၾကတယ္။ ဆိုုးတဲ့သူလည္း ရွိပါတယ္။ အသားအေရာင္ရွိသူမ်ားကိုု အလြန္မုုန္း ဒုုကၡအျမဲေပးသူ၊ မိန္းမမ်ားကိုု မုုန္းတီးဆဲေရးေလ့ရွိသူ၊ စကားမ်ား စပ္စုု အတင္းအျဖင္း မဟုုတ္တာ ေျပာတတ္သူ၊ မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါးသံုုးစြဲသူ အစံုုရွိပါတယ္။
ခ်မ္းသာသူကလည္း ခ်မ္းသာပါ့။ ျမိဳ႕လယ္က အိမ္ခန္းျဖစ္ေတာ့ ရင္းႏွီးျမဳပ္ႏႈံဖိုု႔အတြက္ အိမ္ဝယ္တဲ့သူေတြလည္း အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားရွိပါတယ္။ ဆင္းရဲတဲ့အိမ္ငွားထံမွ အိမ္ခန္းကိုု ဝယ္ခြင့္မရွိဘဲ နည္းမ်ိဳးစံုုနဲ႕ ညစ္ျပီး အေျခာင္ဝယ္တဲ့သူေတြ လည္းရွိခဲ့တယ္။ အိမ္ခန္းဝယ္လိုု႔ရလိုု႕ ေျပာင္းလာတာ ဘာမွာမၾကာလိုုက္ပါဘူး။ ႏွမ္းခ်က္နဲ႕ ႏွမ္းထြက္ မကိုုက္တာ ေတြ႔ရေတာ့တယ္။ အရက္မူးတညလံုုး ရမ္းတဲ့ ဝမ္းမႏိုုင္ ဆီးမႏိုုင္သူတဦး နဲ႔ တထပ္ထဲမွာ အတူေနရေတာ့ ကိုုယ္အိမ္ထဲ ကိုုယ္ေနတာေတာင္ အေမႊးဆီးမီးထြန္းမွ အသက္႐ႈႏိုုင္ေတာ့တယ္။
ခ်မ္းသာသူတိုု႔အတြက္က အမ်ားပိုုင္ ပန္းျခံ အလကား စိုုက္ေပးစရာ လုုိမည္ မထင္ခဲ့ပါ။ ထုုိသူတခ်ိဳ႕က သူတိုု႔မွာ ျခံေျမပါတဲ့ အိမ္ဘယ္ႏွစ္လံုုး နယ္မွာရွိေၾကာင္း ေျပာျပဘူးပါတယ္။ သိုု႔ေသာ္လည္း သူတိုု႔လည္း ေဒၚျဖဴရဲ႕ ပန္းျခံကိုု ၾကိဳက္မွာပါ။ သူတိုု႔အိမ္ေဇ်းေတြလည္း ပန္းျခံေၾကာင့္ တက္လာမွာကိုုး။ ေဒၚျဖဴကေတာ့ ဆင္းရဲတဲ့သူေတြအတြက္၊ ကိုုယ္သစ္ပင္စိုုက္ျခင္း ဝါသနာပါတဲ့အတြက္၊ ငွက္မ်ား၊ ပ်ားမ်ား၊ ပိတုုန္းမ်ား၊ လိပ္ျပာမ်ား၊ ပိုုးမႊားမ်ားအတြက္ ဒီျခံၾကီးကိုု မိမိ ရသမွ်လုုပ္ချဖင့္ စတင္ အေကာင္အထည္ ဖန္တီးဖိုု႔ ၾကံစည္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
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| 10 November 2007 |
ဒီတိုုက္ၾကီး အျပင္ကိုု ထြက္လိုုက္တာနဲ႕ တျပိဳင္နက္ လမ္းေပၚမွာ ျမိဳ႕လယ္မွာ အလည္လာသူ အလုုပ္လာလုုပ္ၾကသူမ်ားစြာမွာ ဝတ္ေကာင္းစားလွျဖင့္ ေၾကာ့ေၾကာ့ေမာ့ေမာ့ စမတ္က်က် သြားေနၾကတာ ေန႔ေရာညပါ ေတြ႕ရမွာပါ။ ဒီေတာ့ ဆင္းရဲတဲ့သူတခ်ိဳ႕ ဟာ နတ္ျပည္အလယ္က ကိုုယ့္အခန္းထဲမွာဘဲ တသက္တကၽြန္းက်ျပီး ကိုုယ္ဘာသာကိုုယ္ တိုုက္ပိတ္ခံ ေနၾကရတယ္။
ဒီေတာ့ ေဒၚျဖဴက ကိုုယ့္အတြက္ပါ ဒီဆင္းရဲမြဲေတေနတဲ့သူေတြ အတြက္ပါ အမ်ားျပည္သူပိုုင္ပန္းျခံတခုုဖန္းတီးေပးဘိုု႔၊ ဒီအမိုုးၾကီးေပၚမွာ ၂၀၀ရခုုႏွစ္ ဇူလိုုင္လကုုန္မွာ စတင္ ျပီး ပန္းပင္အနည္းငယ္ တင္ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မိုုးေရကိုု ခံရန္အတြက္ အမႈိက္ပံုုးအနက္ၾကီးမ်ားကိုု စတင္ဝယ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
လန္ဒန္ျမိဳ႕စြန္က ေဟာင္းစလိုုးတိုု႔ မစ္ဒလ္ဆက္တိုု႔လိုု ေနရာေတြမွာ အလုုပ္သြားလုုပ္လွ်င္ ထိုုေနရာေတြမွာရွိတဲ့ ေဇ်းေပါေပါေရာင္းတဲ့ ပန္းပင္သစ္ပင္ေရာင္းသည့္ ဆိုုင္မ်ားမွ ပန္းပင္သစ္ပင္မ်ားကိုု ဘိန္းတပ္ ထေရာ္လီတခုုနဲ႔ သယ္ျပီး ေျမေအာက္ရထား၊ ဘတ္စကားမ်ားျဖင့္ သယ္ယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ထိုုေန႔မ်ားမွာ ထိုုအခါက အလုုပ္ရွင္မ်ားက ခရီးစရိတ္ေပး သျဖင့္ ထိုု အခမဲ့ တေန႕စာ ခရီးသြားလက္မွတ္ျဖင့္ ဘုုရားလည္းဖူး လိပ္ဥလည္းတူးႏိုုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ကိုုယ္အိမ္ခန္းေရာက္ေသာအခါ လူရွင္းခ်ိန္ေစာင့္ျပီး အပင္မ်ားကိုု အသံမထြက္ဘဲ တိတ္တဆိတ္ အမိုုးေပၚသိုု႔ တေယာက္တည္း မႏိုုင္မနင္း သယ္ခ်ရပါတယ္။ ထိုုသိုု႔ျပဳလုုပ္သည္ကိုု ကေလးငယ္ႏွစ္ဦးကဘဲ သတိထားမိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ႏွစ္လခန္႔ၾကာမွာ သူတိုု႔ဆင္းလာျပီး စပ္စုုေမးျမန္းၾကျပီး မိုုးေရစုုေဆာင္းရာ၊ အပင္မ်ားစိုုက္ရာ၊ တံမ်က္စီးလွဲရာမ်ားမွာ ကူညီေပးၾကပါတယ္။
၂၀၀၇ခုုႏွစ္မွာ မိုုးမ်ားေသာ္လည္း ဒီဇင္ဘာလဆန္းအထိ လန္ဒန္ရာသီဥတုုမွာ ေနသာတဲ့ ရက္မ်ားစြာရွိျပီး ေႏြေထြးမႈရွိေနခဲ့ပါတယ္။
နွင္းဆီပင္ အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကိုု ဇူလိုုင္လမွစျပီး စိုုက္ခဲ့ႏိုုင္ခဲ့ျပီး၊ ၾသဂုုတ္လမွစျပီး ဒီဇင္ဘာလအထိ ပြင့္ၾကပါေတာ့တယ္။ ႏိုုင္ဝင္ဘာလမွ စျပီး၊ ပန္းသီးပင္၊ ဆီးသီးပင္၊ ခ်ယ္ရီပင္၊ ဥေရာပ သစ္ေတာ္သီးပင္၊ မက္မြန္သီးပင္အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး၊ သီးပ်စ္သီးပင္၊ဘယ္ရီသီးပင္အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးကိုု စတင္စိုုက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေဆာင္းတြင္းမွာ အရြက္မရွိတဲ့ ရြက္ေႂကြပင္မ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့အတြက္ အျမဲစိမ္းျခံဳပင္မ်ားနဲ႔အတူတြဲစိုု္က္ထားလုုိက္ပါတယ္။ ဒီဇင္ဘာေရာက္ေသာ္လည္း အျမဲစိမ္းျခံဳပင္မ်ားနဲ႕ သစ္ပင္မ်ားေၾကာင့္ တျခံလံုုးမ်ာ စိမ္းလန္းေနပါတယ္။
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