Myanmar(red)

I don't clearly remember the first time I heard the name Burma or Rangoon. Maybe it was in the school days in the late 1980s when its name was changed to Myanmar and we kids were confused about how to pronounce it or maybe it was on TV watching that old number "mere piya gaye Rangoon, kiya hai wahan se teliphoon" from the 1949 Hindi movie "Patanga".

Yeah, Yangoon sounded ridiculous after being so used to Rangoon but hey I don't even wanna get down to telling you what Bengaluru sounds like to me!

The name of the country, either one, is derived from the name of the major ethnic group of the land, the Bamars. There are other minority ethnic groups in the country as well and therefore deriving the name of the country on the name of one group doesn't sound fair but hey that doesn't bother me eh, after all mine is a country divided over races, castes, religion, region, colour, sects etc etc...phew! Oh! Gees! there's more but I'll let it rest here.

It's a densely forested country and is the world's largest exporter of teak and some precious stones; yeah that means they are chopping off their forests but what else do they do? It's a poor country with a majorly rural population.

I don't konw if S.D. Burman had his roots here but another person sure does, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is from Burma. At 65 she's as old as my mother and had been under house arrest for more than a decade and a half. Her father Aung san is considered the father of modern-day Burma. Why is she under house arrest? Apparently the military junta wouldn't let her govern the country, in other words, let democracy prevail in Burma because apparently her party, the National League for Democracy was too popular and won 59% of the national votes and 80% of the parliament votes and therefore the junta thought it best to lock her in her house and let her cook dishes instead of brewing trouble for them outside it. I mean who'd give up power like that!

By the way the word junta is not Burmese, it's of Portuguese/Spanish origin and translates to "committee" in English. Military Junta however is a term used to describe Military Dictatorship and there are many examples of these like the juntas of Brazil, Nigeria, Greece, Bolivia to name a few. I guess for some armies, when they don't fight any wars for too long against an enemy nation, they turn on their own governments. Shucks! it's not their fault, it must get really boring to do nothing with all that skill and discipline being wasted.

The Burmese junta however isn't all that well meaning though, did I mention teak in the list of exports, add heroine to it, of which Burma is a major exporter. Huh! but why do I bother, let those who take drugs, take them and die. But wait! Drug addicts are a nuisance anywhere they are, aren't they and those promoting nuisance and earning money out of it can't surely be good people. Well Junta, you're being bad boys by doing this and censoring the media in your country to an extent that nobody in your country will ever read what I'm writing; the internet too is heavily policed. I hate the place I live in for n number of reasons but i can't even begin to imagine what life would be like with my "I want more freedom" mind as a Burmese citizen. Hey I'd in Burma I'd probably be very free by now...free from my body, a spirit roaming in the teak jungles and sniffing poppy plants eh! Nice!

Senior General Than Shwe, is Burma's military dictator. It just came to my mind how uncannily it sounds like the Hindi word for dictator "tanashah". This guys been the big boss for a long time now, since 1992 to be precise. He's weird ok! When the common Burmese folks struggle to procure just enough for their subsistence, Than Shwe lives like a megalomaniac and is incredibly superstitious. Next time somebody asks you to frame a sentence with the word "unconscionable jerk", you know what to write.

So what's with the new Election hogwash in Myanmar?
It's nothing really it's just going to be transition from a military dictatorship to a non-military one. Suu Kyi is still detained and debarred, and other, more than two-thousand political prisoners, these elections were meant to be nothing but hogwash.

So why does the junta need to wash its hogs? Ah! International sanctions you see, there's more to the world that the junta gets so the junta is carrying out a cosmetic surgery to change it's appearance. After all, after the world no longer recognises them, or fakes to not recognize them, as a military dictatorship, they'd start to lift their sanctions. Why would the other countries do that? Aha! Because Burma has something the whole world drools at the prospect of obtaining; OIL!!
China certainly has more money than India to appease Myanmar and it is definitely doing so in lieu of exploiting the Burmese oil and other resources.

I end the article here. With this wee-bit information you can form your own clear opinion and read more on the aspects of this article that you wanna know more about. But the last, and definitely not the least, of the questions that comes to my mind is this, What kind of neighbours are we surrounded (hounded) by?