Burma

Burma is not a country that most people think about every day, or even every year. Rarely in the news, off the radar screens, one never hears about it, except perhaps as a passing mention in the odd State of the Union Address (was that bizarre or what!). What most people know about it can be summarized by the words backward and dictatorship. If probed, they may add that it is a small country somewhere in South East Asia occupied by the monolithic "Burmese" people. The reality is, of course, that the country is quite large and far from monolithic. It is populated by a diverse range of ethnic groups with distinct cultures that speak languages that don't even share the same root (some are Indo-European, some share Southern China origins, some, like the Wa are unclassifiable). Sort of like a problematic version of India.

My fascination with Burma began about 35 years ago. I was visiting my father at his Air Force base in North Eastern India for the summer holidays. I already knew something about Burma, my (maternal) grandfather had been stationed in Rangoon during the end of the Second World War and was full of stories about that country, about the Stilwell Road, about the epic battle to re-take Burma from the Japanese. The battle in Europe was a cakewalk in comparison. One day, while I was visiting him, announced that we should go for a drive along the Stilwell Road. We drove in an Air Force jeep up to the Ledo border and there I could see Burma. There was a well paved road and a border checkpost on the Indian side but, on the Burmese side, there was no checkpost, no guard, nobody. And, the "man a mile," Stilwell Road had been swallowed up by the jungle. I don't know what it was about the contrast but my little boy heart wanted to know more about what was going on across that border.

Of course, it is not easy to know what is actually going on across that border. Books on Burma are few and far between and that has always been the case. A colonial backwater, few British civilians and soldiers wrote about Burma, and most books are out of print. After the 1962 coup, the whole country disappeared into a black hole from which it is only now returning. Still, I read everything I could find. For a long time it was next to impossible to get a visa to visit. But, visit I did. On my first visit, I was interviewed on three separate occasions by head of the mission, suspicious, I suppose, of my motives in visiting. On a more recent visit, I walked into the London embassy and walked out with a visa, no questions asked, thanks to the desperate need that the junta has for hard currency. What I found was a complicated country, in some ways stuck in a time warp but in other ways as savvy as the savviest Silicon Valley entreprenuer. It is hard to get a read on Burma by visiting Burma because one sees so little of the country and only what the junta wants you to see.

So, books about Burma. More to come ....