Summary
LETTER FROM BURMA - Travel narrative
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Extract
Captives of the Junta.
A group of National League for Democracy (NLD) members gathered outside their party headquarters in Yangon to mark Suu Kji's 63rd birthday Thursday by releasing 63 sparrows and shouting "Free Aung San Suu Kyi. "Seven government cars arrived shortly after the protest began and rounded up at least 30 of the NLD members, taking them away to an unknown destination.
--Indo-Asian News Service, June 19, 2008 Rangoon, summer 2008, and the eastern staircase of the Shwedagon Pagoda spills out into shops and stalls. All the bric-a-brac of Buddhism. The bells, the beads, the monks' robes and bowls, strings of jasmine flowers, little bamboo cages ripe with birds. For a few kyat, a bit less than a dime, you can release one of them, these nervous little sparrows, release them in a kind of prayer, some essence of that freedom flying to whatever your hope might be. The Burmese believe in such cause and effect. Do the good deed and you will get the good response. Do the bad deed and you will get the bad response. From the seed the fruit must follow. Hard to argue with such faith, really, though anything one thinks about enough becomes problematic. Take the pretty metaphor of the sar kaley, the little birds for sale in the cages. "They do have in them an element of bad karma for us also," as one trishaw driver explains. "The more we buy, the more the man will be encouraged to catch." Besides, I'm told the birds mostly return to their cages, that they've been tamed, that they prefer life with one another like this, the closeness, the community. And I'm told the man sometimes mixes opium with their seed. Or that children often carry the ...See the full content of this document
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