Rangoon rolls into plastic age

It was part of tradition, meritorious acts in Buddhist culture.

Neighborhood water pots re-filled by retirees, housewives or anyone looking for karmic credit for a good deed.

Many terracotta pots are gone, replaced in some places by plastic bottles and chained tin cups.

"Diminishing clay water pots could mean diminishing trust and caring, in communities," says U Sue Hnget, a famous Burmese writer.

Village Twante is littered with abandoned kilns.
Potter U Kyaw Soe  has begun to focus on flower pots and decorative planters.  He offers customers refrigerated water, in plastic bottles. His children are majoring in Japanese and geography.

Plastic is now a growing scourge.
Crunch of plastics startle oxen that draw carts.
Structural glazing startle crumbling colonial architecture.
Shorts and soccer jerseys diminish sarongs and bamboo pith helmets.
Disposable plastic bottles float, in Airawathi and Rangoon rivers.

Hannah Beech  - Clay pots that quenched Myanmar's thirst ,  
Times of India    Saturday    October 12, 2019.

Clangour of bells

Thae Su Wai wheels away her new bicycle at Nhaw Kone Village School, near Yangon.

" I have more time to play with friends," she says.

The 11 year old is among the first 200 students to receive bicycles, as part of an initiative by Lesswalk.

- The Straits Times, Singapore.

mass amnesties mark Thingyan

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were released under a Presidential amnesty for 6,520 prisoners.

President Win Myint has pardoned thousands of other prisoners in mass amnesties, since last month - to mark the traditional new year.

- Reuters 

gently flows the Airawathi

Transition from a developed Myanmar to an untouched part, was glaring.
Vehicles, concrete buildings or towering Pagodas were absent.
Mighty Airawathi meandered into our sight, winding it's way beneath large wooden houses that stood on stilts.
It's residents bathed in the river by the dozens.
The entire town had a handful of 2-storied concrete buildings.
Our guest house was one of them.

- Yashoda Dewi and Paul Chowdhry in  Deccan Chronicle, Sunday 24 June, 2018. 

Amur - the immortal

Ice forms in Amur in second week of October.
Upper reaches become ice-bound at the beginning of November.


Fed by monsoon rains in summer and autumn, Amur floods and fills from May to October.


Amur reaches it's lowest level in March and April.
And the spring flood is fed by melted snow run-off.


- Encyclopaedia Britannica

office of citizen

Walter Lippmann insight-fully pointed out that democracy can succeed only if it draws sustenance from civil society and it's institutions.

Addressing the University of Rochester in June 1936, he said that, "One of the reasons why democracy has worked in America is that outside the government and outside the party system, there have existed independent institutions and independent men."

"There have been free churches, free press, free universities and free men with sufficient secured property of their own, farms, factories, shops, professions, savings which were protected by the law. And not dependent on the will of elected or appointed officials."

Trade, business and industry constitute vital elements of civil society as indeed do teachers, educationists and journalists.

It is necessary that citizens strengthen civil society.
And help it's institutions break free, from the crippling reach of state power.

A G Noorani - When state fails, civil society steps in 
Deccan Chronicle, August 21, 2016.

raaja-tarangini

I find in Raaja-tarangini, - the thousand year old Kashmiri historic epic, of poet Kalhana, -  that the phrase is repeatedly used, in the sense of law and order.

It was duty of the ruler and state to preserve, dharma and abhaya – righteousness and absence of fear. 

Law was something more than mere law.
And order was, the fearlessness of people. 

How much more desirable is this idea of inculcating fearlessness, than of enforcing ‘order’ on a frightened populace!

 - Aung San Suu Kyi, 
Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial lecture, New Delhi