En uno de estos inesperados encuentros que empezaba a echar de menos, he tenido la suerte de disfrutar un almuerzo con mi compañero de piso (qué inusual) y con un chico venezolano. Despedíamos a un amigo común chileno que se volvía para casa y, aprovechando que mi compañero y yo íbamos, como es ritual los jueves, a comernos el plato que tanto nos gusta típico del este de China: una hamburguesa con mayonesa (según el corte del mapa, el oeste también me vale) - que viendo la reticencia de los camareros a traer la mayonesa, pronto será solo hamburguesa-, el chico se sumó a nuestra evocadora iniciativa. Allí estuvimos largo y tendido, casi como entrevistador y entrevistado, hablando con el muchacho, de ahora en adelante Vincent, sobre la situación de Venezuela. Desde el primer momento ya puse mis conocimientos sobre el tablero: Venezuela- definición. Porque a estas alturas y después de tanto jaleo con la prensa española sobre la situación de Venezuela, tengo por sentado que en mi cabeza hay sólo ruido y ni una nuez. Vincent ha tenido la paciencia de adentrarnos en el tabú español de la situación en Venezuela, casí sacrílega y así pues nos ha explicado la vergonzosa coyuntura en la que se encuentra ahora mismo el país, irreconocible a como se encontraba hace tres años. "Lo mejor es que hemos tocado tan hondo que ya no podemos ir a peor" - nos decía. "En abril son las elecciones, así que saldrá Maduro del gobierno y Venezuela volverá a coger fuerza". Él considera a Chávez un buen presidente y no descarta que el cáncer se lo indujera Estados Unidos. "Todos sabemos que las células cancerígenas se puden potenciar, y es muy sospechoso que en aquella reunión donde estaban [... ... no recuerdo los nombres de los otros] acabaran todos murieron de cáncer. No digo que pasara, pero nunca se podrá saber al 100%. Vincent reconoce las bondades de Chávez y coinciden con las opiniones de algunos venezolanos que salían entrevistados en el programa de Salvados. "Es en el de la entrevista que Jordi Évole le hace a Maduro"- le dije. "Sí, me la he visto. Le pone en un aprieto" - Me dice con una sonrisa. Es de esos venezolanos, que se sintieron entusiasmados bajo el proyecto de Chávez, donde veían que el país funcionaba y que con Maduro no hacen más que ver una impotencia y e inutilidad abismal. "Chávez ya empezó a meter a amigos en las empresas, pero no robaban porque les controlaba. Sin embargo, desde que Chávez empezó a ser hospitalizado y en especial a su muerte, tras la victoria de Maduro, robaban a manos llenas. Muchas de esas compañías están en quiebra". No hay que olvidar que Maduro fue elegido democráticamente en su país. "No sé como votan ustedes allá, pero en Venezuela hay mucha seriedad al respecto. Hay que presentar el carnét de identidad, firmar y pasar un control de verificación a través de huella dactilar. En el momento en que pasas el dedo tenemos un minuto para votar. Después hay que meter el dedo en un bote de tinta (o algo así) para que esté claro que ya votaron". Yo creo que en España, o yo al menos, tenemos la sensación de que en latinoamérica no resulta extraño pensar en pufos electorales. Al fin y al cabo, siempre están las noticias de Méjico con sus narcos y sus dedos largos y es cierto que la historia de Sudamérica, muy a su pesar y con agente extranjero -EEUU- metido hasta la cocina, ha sido convulsa. Por eso creo que la prensa ha sabido aprovechar ese filón, de desconocimiento hacia el propio país, para llevar hasta el extremo de insinuarse como gobierno ilegítimo o no democrático, el de Chávez primero, que ganó por amplia mayoría y después del de Maduro, que gano éste sí, por un resultado de lo más ajustado. Vincent considerando a Maduro como pésimo presidente, no duda de su legitimidad. Le comento sobre la oposición, algo sobre un intento de golpe de estado que me suena haber leído en la prensa. Me explica la situación. "La oposición lo estaba haciendo bien, tenía un alto respaldo electoral, la gente no quería a Maduro. Pero luego lo empezaron a hacer mal. Empezaron a salir a la calle y a agitar a la gente, a que se creara violencia. Y desde entonces han perdido mucha legitimidad. Ha sido un error, porque ahora la cosa está ahí ahí y siendo las elecciones ya pronto en abril sería un desastre que volviera a ganar Maduro". Yo le pregunto si cree que con la oposición Venezuela volverá a coger firmeza. Si cree que la oposición en el gobierno volverá a privatizar los sectores estratégicos que nacionalizó Chávez y si eso sería un error. Él me contesta que sí, que seguramente lo privaticen todo pero es lo que Venezuela necesita ahora. "Se necesita trabajo y se necesita el dinero y luego ya en el futuro habrá que pensar en qué hacer de nuevo. Además, si gana la oposición, Europa y Estados Unidos nos quitarán las sanciones". Nos habla de las sanciones, de cómo gente de altos puestos ha sido prohibido su acceso a países de la Unión Europea y sus cuentas bancarias congeladas. "Nos incitan a que tomemos represalias. Y yo qué voy a hacer weón, son ellos los sacan los riales afuera y ahora se vienen quejando". Le preguntamos por la seguridad, que no debe ser muy buena: "No lo es, ni ahora ni nunca lo fue. Es verdad que ahora se asaltan supermercados y los camiones, porque ahora se pasa hambre. Pero siempre ha habido secuestros. A dos amigos míos les secuestraron. Son secuestros estudiados, pero a uno de ellos fue fortuito, no le conocían, pero hizo mucha ostentación en la playa. Pidieron 10000 y 2000 dólares. Pero les trataron bien, les dan jugo y comida." Le pregunto si sabe de algún secuestro que no se pagase el rescate. Sé de un caso que se hizo famoso, el de los hermanos (no me acuerdo lo que dijo pero buscando en internet debe ser el de los hermanos Faddoul) donde se avisó a la policía, los secuestradores se dieron cuenta y los mataron". "Estos rescates la gente suele pagarlos, es lo más seguro". "Algunos van con guardaespaldas y con coches blindados, lo mejor es pasar desapercibido. Había una chica de padre italiano que no sabía el dinero que tenía hasta que entré a su casa". Le pregunto sobre el hambre que hay en Venezuela y él me lo reconoce. "A un amigo mío que solía estar fuerte le pregunté weón que te veo flaco, - es que como lo que pillo en la nevera - refiriéndose a sólo pan y lo que puede comprar. Ahora si trabajas en el McDonalds el sueldo da para una caja de huevos al día. Ahora les paso algo de dinero a mis padres, 50 dólares a cada uno y con eso les da de sobra para el mes. Porque la comida está barata, si traes dinero de fuera. Si ganas en bolívares no te da para nada." Nos habla del trabajo de su padre, que antes ganaba mucho. "Él trabajaba para un seguro de coches. Se dedicaba a investigar si las denuncias por robo eran verdaderas o no. Mucha gente fingía el robo para cobrar el seguro. Era muy bueno en eso. Sin embargo, recuerdo una vez en Navidades que éstabamos de viaje y le llamaron de un caso. Él lo constató y se dió cuenta de que era un robo fingido. Sin embargo les dijo -envíadme un par de botellas de whisky a casa y nos dejamos de líos-. Era Navidad, no quería fastidiárselas. Al día siguiente nos llegaron las botellas." Vincent nos sigue hablando de Venezuela, nos habla de los días de Chávez, de su programa aló presidente de los domingos donde durante seis horas se hacía un vecino más del pueblo. "Llamó a cual empresa para pedirle explicaciones de los retrasos del proyecto. Estuve aquí hace un año y sólo esta la misma piedra. Por qué no está ya acabada la carretera." Le pregunto si no cree que eso es populismo, hacer esa llamada en directo, "No, lo hacía con muchas". Me cuenta que su abuela, opositora convencida, les decía que no cambiaran de canal cuando aparecía Chávez. "Y también le gustaba escuchar sus canciones". Ya ven, guste o no, Chávez no dejaba indiferente. Recordamos entre ambos sus apariciones en la ONU, con sus discursos contra Mr. Ranger y el aquí huele a azufre. Me comenta la frase con la que se despachó de contestar a una diputada que le llamó ladrón, un águila no caza moscas. Él también se acuerda del porqué no te te callas. "Es que Chávez no cierra el pico. En Venezuela tenemos la broma de que los días que vas con prisa te aparece Chávez en la puerta." La conversación se prolonga y nos habla del turismo en Venezuela, para nosotros totalmente desconocido. "Deberían ver las playas de Isla Margarita". La misma isla, recuerdo, donde el perturbado López de Aguirre desembarcó con sus marañones y le declaró la guerra a Felipe II. Mencionamos al Che Guevara, y pensamos en ese sueño que pudo ser y no fue de una sudamérica unida. "Hace bien poco volvía a haber entendimiento, pero Chile, Perú y Colombia prefieren mirar para América del Norte."
Conversaciones, en fin, que le aderezan a uno la hamburguesa.
Saturday, 3 February 2018
Thursday, 1 February 2018
Recortes: Myanmar
La misma intención que "recortes: Sri Lanka" traigo en esta entrada de hoy, donde escribiré los recortes de los tres libros que he escogido como paso previo a mi visita a Myanmar. En este caso las tres obras son: "Burmese days" de George Orwell, "The piano tuner" de David Mason y "Letters from Burma" de Aung San Suu Kyi.
Del libro de George Orwell, de particular interés es la conversación entre el protagonista Flory, trabajador británico en una compañía de explotación de madera de teca en Birmania, y el doctor Veraswami que describen la presencia del imperio británico en el país:
the Englishman was bitterly anti-English and the Indian fanatically loyal. Dr Veraswami had a passionate admiration for the English, which a thousand snubs from Englishmen had not shaken. He would maintain with positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerate race. His faith in British justice was so great that even when, at the jail, he had to superintend a flogging or a hanging, and would come home with his black face faded grey and dose himself with whisky, his zeal did not falter.
-‘how can you make out that we are in this country for any purpose except to steal? It’s so simple. The official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets. [...] The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English — or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.’
-You say you are here to trade? Of course you are. Could the Burmese trade for themselves? Can they make machinery, ships, railways, roads? They are helpless without you. What would happen to the Burmese forests if the English were not here? They would be sold immediately to the Japanese, who would gut them and ruin them. Instead of which, in your hands, actually they are improved. And while your businessmen develop the resources of our country, your officials are civilizing us, elevating us to their level, from pure public spirit. It is a magnificent record of self-sacrifice.’
-We teach the young men to drink whisky and play football, I admit, but precious little else. Look at our schools — factories for cheap clerks. We’ve never taught a single useful manual trade to the Indians. We daren’t; frightened of the competition in industry. We’ve even crushed various industries. [...]Back in the forties or thereabouts they were building sea-going ships in India, and manning them as well. Now you couldn’t build a seaworthy fishing boat there. In the eighteenth century the Indians cast guns that were at any rate up to the European standard. Now, after we’ve been in India a hundred and fifty years, you can’t make so much as a brass cartridge-case in the whole continent. The only Eastern races that have developed at all quickly are the independent ones. I won’t instance Japan, but take the case of Siam — ’
-How iss it possible to have developed us, with our apathy and superstition? At least you have brought to us law and order. The unswerving British Justice and the Pax Britannica.’
-Of course we keep the peace in India, in our own interest, but what does all this law and order business boil down to? More banks and more prisons — that’s all it means.’
-‘Are not prissons necessary? And have you brought us nothing but prissons? Consider Burma in the days of Thibaw, with dirt and torture and ignorance, and then look around you. Look merely out of this veranda — look at that hospital, and over to the right at that school and that police station. Look at the whole uprush of modern progress!’
-I don’t deny,’ Flory said, ‘that we modernize this country in certain ways. We can’t help doing so. In fact, before we’ve finished we’ll have wrecked the whole Burmese national culture. But we’re not civilizing them, we’re only rubbing our dirt on to them. Where’s it going to lead, this uprush of modern progress, as you call it? Just to our own dear old swinery of gramophones and billycock hats. [...] Sometimes I think that in two hundred years all this — ’ he waved a foot towards the horizon — ‘all this will be gone — forests, villages, monasteries, pagodas all vanished. And instead, pink villas fifty yards apart; all over those hills, as far as you can see, villa after villa, with all the gramophones playing the same tune. And all the forests shaved flat — chewed into wood-pulp for the News of the World, or sawn up into gramophone cases. But the trees avenge themselves, as the old chap says in The Wild Duck.
-But, my friend, what you do not see iss that your civilization at its very worst iss for us an advance. Gramophones, billycock hats, the News of the World — all iss better than the horrible sloth of the Oriental.
-I see the British, even the least inspired of them, ass — ass — ’ the doctor searched for a phrase, and found one that probably came from Stevenson — ‘ass torchbearers upon the path of progress.’
-‘I don’t. I see them as a kind of up-to-date, hygienic, self-satisfied louse. Creeping round the world building prisons. They build a prison and call it progress,’
-Consider that there are also other achievements of your countrymen. They construct roads, they irrigate deserts, they conquer famines, they build schools, they set up hospitals, they combat plague, cholera, leprosy, smallpox, venereal disease — ’
-‘Having brought it themselves,’ put in Flory.
-‘No, sir, it wass the Indians who introduced venereal disease into this country. The Indians introduce diseases, and the English cure them.
-‘Well, doctor, we shall never agree. The fact is that you like all this modern progress business, whereas I’d rather see things a little bit septic. Burma in the days of Thibaw would have suited me better, I think. And as I said before, if we are a civilizing influence, it’s only to grab on a larger scale. We should chuck it quickly enough if it didn’t pay.’
El punto de vista de uno de los británicos (el pensamiento más extendido entre los británicos de las colonias, al menos en el libro):
-We seem to have no AUTHORITY over the natives nowadays, with all these dreadful Reforms, and the insolence they learn from the newspapers. In some ways they are getting almost as bad as the lower classes at home.’
-‘that in the end we shall simply LEAVE India. Young men will not come out here any longer to work all their lives for insults and ingratitude. We shall just GO. When the natives come to us begging us to stay, we shall say, “No, you have had your chance, you wouldn’t take it. Very well, we shall leave you to govern yourselves.” And then, what a lesson that will teach them!’
-the conversation veered back to the old, never-palling subject — the insolence of the natives, the supineness of the Government, the dear dead days when the British Raj WAS the British Raj and please give the bearer fifteen lashes.
-He had dodged military service, which was easy to do and seemed natural at the time. The civilians in Burma had a comforting theory that ‘sticking by one’s job’ (wonderful language, English! ‘Sticking BY’ — how different from ‘sticking TO’) was the truest patriotism; there was even a covert hostility towards the men who threw up their jobs in order to join the Army.
Y el pensamiento en oposición del protagonista:
-There is a prevalent idea that the men at the ‘outposts of Empire’ are at least able and hardworking. It is a delusion. Outside the scientific services — the Forest Department, the Public Works Department and the like — there is no particular need for a British official in India to do his job competently. Few of them work as hard or as intelligently as the postmaster of a provincial town in England. The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates; and the real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the businessmen can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them ARE fools.
-Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’ code.
-He had forgotten that most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants.
-‘It’s all right with a Chinaman. They’re a favoured race in this country. And they’re very democratic in their ideas. It’s best to treat them more or less as equals.’
El punto de vista de un personaje Birmano de pocos escrúpulos:
-In his childish way he had grasped that his own people were no match for this race of giants (los ingleses). To fight on the side of the British, to become a parasite upon them, had been his ruling ambition, even as a child. [...] According to Buddhist belief, those who have done evil in their lives will spend the next incarnation in the shape of a rat, a frog or some other low animal. U Po Kyin was a good Buddhist and intended to provide against this danger. He would devote his closing years to good works, which would pile up enough merit to outweigh the rest of his life. Probably his good works would take the form of building pagodas. Four pagodas, five, six, seven — the priests would tell him how many — with carved stonework, gilt umbrellas and little bells that tinkled in the wind, every tinkle a prayer. And he would return to the earth in male human shape — for a woman ranks at about the same level as a rat or a frog — or at best as some dignified beast such as an elephant.
-anti-British opinions. That is far worse than bribery; they expect a native official to take bribes. But let them suspect his loyalty even for a moment, and he is ruined.’
-He was proud of his fatness, because he saw the accumulated flesh as the symbol of his greatness.
-In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain.
Sobre Myanmar:
-(Antigua moneda usada en el subcontinente indio) annas (un 1/16 de la rupia) and pice (1/4 de anna).
-The Burmese are Mongolians, the Indians are Aryans or Dravidians, and all of them are quite distinct
--There are a people in this country called the Palaungs who admire long necks in women. The girls wear broad brass rings to stretch their necks, and they put on more and more of them until in the end they have necks like giraffes.
-Every year from February to May the sun glared in the sky like an angry god, then suddenly the monsoon blew westward, first in sharp squalls, then in a heavy ceaseless downpour [...]. Through July and August there was hardly a pause in the rain. [...] The rains tailed off, ending in October.
-Mandalay is rather a disagreeable town — it is dusty and intolerably hot, and it is said to have five main products all beginning with P, namely, pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes
Sobre la personalidad atormentada del protagonista:
-with the half-smile of a man who is never sure of his popularity.
-Flory had signed a public insult to his friend. He had done it for the same reason as he had done a thousand such things in his life; because he lacked the small spark of courage that was needed to refuse.
-it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life — he had grasped the truth about the English and their Empire. The Indian Empire is a despotism — benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object.
-It is not the less bitter because it is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.
-Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.
Aparte:
-the old colonel who used to sleep without a mosquito net. They asked his servant why and the servant said: “At night, master too drunk to notice mosquitoes; in the morning, mosquitoes too drunk to notice master.”
-It was a little like the familiar picture (is it Meissonier’s?) of Napoleon at Moscow, poring over his maps while his marshals wait in silence, with their cocked hats in their hands.
-‘At least touch me with your lips, then. (There is no Burmese word for to kiss.)
-He put his hand on her breast. Privately, Ma Hla May did not like this, for it reminded her that her breasts existed — the ideal of a Burmese woman being to have no breasts.
-Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work.
De piano tuner:
Sobre la historia:
-since our occupation of the coastal states of Burma sixty years ago, through the recent annexation of Mandalay and Upper Burma, Her Majesty has seen the occupation and pacification of the territory as central to the security of our Empire throughout Asia. Despite our military victories, several developments seriously endanger our Burmese possessions. Recent intelligence reports have confirmed the consolidation of French forces along the Mekong River in Indo-China, while within Burma local insurgence threatens our hold on the remoter regions of the country. [...] we risk invasion, French or even Siamese.
-He had known of the Anglo-Burmese wars, conflicts notable both for their brevity and for the considerable territorial gains wrested from the Burmese kings following each victory: the coastal states of Arakan and Tenasserim following the first war, Rangoon and Lower Burma following the second, Upper Burma and the Shan States following the third. And while the first two wars, which ended in 1826 and 1853, he had learned about at school, the third had been reported in the newspapers last year, and the final annexation announced only in January. But, beyond the general histories, most of the details were unfamiliar: that the second war began ostensibly over the kidnapping of two British sea captains, that the third stemmed in part from tension following the refusal of British emissaries to remove their shoes on entering an audience with the Burmese King.
-he focused his attention mainly on the history of the most recent king, named Thibaw, who had been deposed and exiled to India after British troops seized Mandalay. He was, by the army’s account, a weak and ineffective leader, manipulated by his wife and mother-in-law, and his reign had been marred by increasing lawlessness in the remoter districts, evidenced by a plague of attacks by armed bands of dacoits,
-the Shan revolt against British rule finds its beginnings in an incipient revolt against a Burman king.
-The Shan, who refer to themselves as the Tai or Thai, share a common historical heritage with their eastern neighbours, the Siamese, the Lao and the Yunnanese. The Shan believe their ancestral home was in southern China. [...] at the time of the Mongol invasions, the Tai-Thai people had established a number of kingdoms. These included the fabled Yunnanese kingdom of Xipsongbanna, whose name means ‘Kingdom of ten thousand rice fields’, the ancient Siamese capital at Sukhothai, and – more importantly for the subject of this briefing – two kingdoms within the present borders of Burma: the kingdom of Tai Mao in the north and the kingdom of Ava in the vicinity of present-day Mandalay.
-Before the Sepoy Rebellion, when our holdings in Burma were administered by the East India Company, opium use was even encouraged – the trade was quite lucrative. But there has always been a call to prohibit or tax it by those who object to its ‘‘corrupting influences’’. Last year the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade requested that the Viceroy ban the trade. Their request was rejected quietly. This was no surprise; it is one of our largest cash crops in India. And banning it really does nothing. The merchants just start smuggling the drug by sea. The smugglers are actually rather clever. They put the opium in bags and tie them to blocks of salt. If the ships are searched, they merely drop the cargo into the water. After a certain time the salt dissolves and the package floats back to the surface.’ [...] ‘Approve of what? Of opium? It is one of the best medicines that I have, an antidote for pain, diarrhoea, coughing, perhaps the most common symptoms of the diseases I see here. Anyone who wishes to make policies on such subjects should come here first.’
Sobre geografía:
-‘the Shan States’ consists of a large plateau that floats to the east above the dusty central valley of the Irrawaddy River. It is a vast and green Elysian plain, which extends north to the border of Yunnan and east to Siam.
-the ruins of Pagan, the ancient capital of a kingdom that had ruled Burma for centuries.
-pass the old capital of Amarapura, which means ‘City of the Immortals’.
-Ayutthaya, the old capital of Siam.
-the Straits of Bab al Mandab, (estrecho entre Yemen y Djibouti que da comienzo al Mar Rojo)
-They dropped anchor in the port of Aden, where the harbour was full with steamers destined for all over the world,
Sobre tradiciones burmesas:
-‘They call it thanaka. It is made from ground sandalwood. Almost all the women wear it and many of the men. They cover the babies with it too.’ ‘Whatever for?’ ‘Protects against the sun, they say, makes them beautiful. We call it “Burmese face powder”. Why do English women wear face powder?’
-Cheroot (los puros birmanos)
-as monks should not eat after noon.
-‘What’s a pwè? You are in for a wonderful treat. Burmese street theatre, [...] ‘A pwè,’ began the Captain, before they were out the door, ‘is uniquely Burmese and I might even say Mandalayan, for here the art is at its finest. There are many reasons to hold a pwè, for births or for deaths, for namings, when Burmese girls have their first ear piercing, when young men become monks, when they stop being monks, when pagodas are dedicated. Or even non-religious reasons: if one wins a lucky bet, builds a house or even digs a well, when there is a good harvest, a boxing match, when a fire balloon is released. Anything else you can think of. A propitious event and a man holds a pwè. [...] There are many types of pwè. There is the ahlu pwè, a pwè sponsored by a rich man to commemorate a religious festival or the entry of his son into the monastery. They are usually the best as he can afford to hire the finest actors. Then there are the subscription pwè, when a member of a neighbourhood will collect money from others and pool it to hire a pwè company then an a-yein pwè, a dance performance, then the kyigyin pwè, a free performance offered by an actor or company trying to make their name famous. And then of course, the yôkthe pwè, puppets. [...] there is the zat pwè, or real story, a religious play that tells one of the stories of the Buddha’s lives. There are many of these as the Buddha had five hundred and ten incarnations, although, only ten are usually performed, the so-called Zatgyi Sèbwè, dramas about how the Buddha overcame each of the deadly sins. That is what is playing tonight: the Nemi zat is the fifth,’ ‘Fourth,’ ‘Thank you, Khin Myo, the fourth Zatgyi Sèbwè. ‘This one is about Prince Nemi, one of the Buddha’s incarnations, who is born into a long line of Burmese kings. As a young man, Prince Nemi is so pious that the spirits decide to invite him to see heaven. One moonlit night, perhaps very much like tonight, they send a chariot down to earth. I can only imagine the awe of Prince Nemi and his people as they watch the chariot descend, and fall before it, trembling with fear. The Prince boards it, and it disappears, leaving only the moon. The chariot takes Nemi first to the heavens, where the nats live – nats are Burmese folk spirits, even good Buddhists believe they are everywhere – and then to Nga-yè, the underworld where the serpents called nagas dwell. At last he returns reluctantly to his world to share the wonders he has seen. The finale is quite sad: it was the tradition of the kings that when they grew old and sensed that death was near they left their homes and travelled into the desert to die as hermits. And so one day Nemi, like his forefathers before him, wanders into the mountains to die.’
Sobre las etnias:
-Ask any child of the Shan, or the Wa, or the Pa-O,
-hypnotic words he would later learn were not Burmese but Pali.
-Palaung, Paduang, Danu, Shan, Pa-O, Wa, Kachin, Karen, Karenni. And those are just some of the biggest tribes.’
-to remove a Shan’s turban in life is a mortal insult.
-Som tae-tae kwa means ‘Thank you.’
Sobre pianos:
-following its invention by Cristofori in the early eighteenth century, the piano underwent great modifications, and the Erard, the subject of this letter, is indebted, as all modern pianos are, to this tremendous tradition.
-Sebastien Erard was from Strasbourg, a German, but he went to Paris in 1768 when he was sixteen and apprenticed himself to a harpsichord maker. The boy – to put it simply – was a prodigy and soon he quit his apprenticeship and opened his own shop. The other Parisian craftsmen felt so threatened by the boy’s gift that they launched a campaign to have him close his shop after he designed a clavecin mécanique, a harpsichord with multiple registers, with quill and cowhide plectra, all operated by an ingenious pedal mechanism which had never been thought of before. But, despite the boycott, the design was so impressive that the Duchess of Villeroi gave the young Erard her sponsorship. Erard started to make pianofortes, and the Duchess’s noble friends started to buy them. This time he aroused the ire of importers who resented the competition with their imported English pianos. They tried to raid his house, only to be blocked by none other than soldiers of Louis XVI; Erard was so renowned that the King gave him full licence to trade.
- (cuando afina el piano) he then turned to the notes that lay in between, to set them in equal temperament, so that the notes were all equally spaced along the octave. It was a concept apprentices often found difficult to understand. Each note produces a sound at a particular frequency, he would explain, strings in tune with one another can harmonize, while out-of-tune strings produce frequencies which overlap to produce a rhythmic pulse, known as a beat, a synchrony of slightly discordant sounds. On a piano tuned perfectly in a particular key, there should be no beats when correct intervals are played. But then it is impossible to play the piano in any other key. Equal temperament was an innovation that allowed for more than one key to be played on a single instrument, the sacrifice being that no key would be in perfect tune. To tune in equal temperament meant deliberately creating beats, adjusting the strings finely so that only a well-trained ear could discern that they were slightly, if necessarily, out of tune.
-Bach’s prelude and fugue in C sharp minor, the fourth piece of Bach’s collections of preludes and fugues known as The Well-Tempered Clavier, or as simply The Forty-Eight after the number of prelude variations, which are arranged into two books, each of twenty-four chapters.
-“Allegro con brio” of Haydn’s Sonata No. 50 in D major’.
-‘Clementi, Sonata in F sharp minor,’
-the song is but an elaboration of one simple melody, we are destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines.
Aparte:
-Edgar keeps so few secrets that those he does become lies.
-he had learned early that being needed was not the same as being accepted.
-Mae Lwin?’ ‘Mae is a Shan word for river. It is the same in Siamese.’
-most Europeans think the disease is caused by breathing bad air from the swamps, which is why the Italians named the disease ‘‘mala aria’’, ‘‘bad air’’.
-Death from cobra bite is terrible: the venom paralyses the diaphragm so the patient suffocates. It took but half an hour for him to die. In Burma few snakes other than the Asian cobra kill so fast. A Shan remedy for snake bites is to tie off the wound, which we did (although all knew that this would be to little avail), to suck on the wound (which I did), and to apply a paste of pounded spiders (but we had none and, in truth, I have always doubted the efficacy of this cure).
-King Mindon (penultimate king of Burma)
-(sobre la Odisea) I always read it as a tragic tale of Odysseus’s struggle to find his way home. Now I understand more and more what Dante and Tennyson wrote about it, that he wasn’t lost, but that after the wonders he had seen Odysseus couldn’t, perhaps didn’t want to, return home.’
De la bibliografía usada por Daniel Manson en el afinador de pianos:
-The Burman, the first academic piece I read on the country and the inspiration for much of the cultural background to my story.
-The Making of Modern Burma (2001) is worth noting for its discussion of the Anglo-Burmese wars,
De Letters from Burma:
Sobre la autora (cogido del prólogo): why there is such a well-spring of feeling for Aung San Suu Kyi. After all, she has been actively involved at the forefront of Burmese politics for less than a decade – nothing like the lifetime of political struggle of her fellow Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela. Perhaps the most eloquent answer to my question came from an old man, standing drenched to the skin outside Aung San Suu Kyi’s house on the day after her release. ‘We come here because we know that we are the most important thing in the world to her. She cares about us.’ To a people who suffer continually the brutality of one of the world’s most odious regimes, the notion that a leader might actually care about them, and risk her own freedom to fight for theirs, is indeed unusual. [...] I began to appreciate the singular qualities which inspired such devotion among her followers. Chief among the attributes which make her a remarkable leader in our times is a deep humanity, a gift for understanding and embracing the pain of others as if it were her own. Much of her time these days is spent listening to the voices of ordinary people, who risk arrest by coming to her compound to talk about their problems. Poverty, military oppression, the hunger for arable land, all are discussed with the supplicants who come to the house by the lake. None are turned away without being given a hearing. [...] these wonderful letters from Burma, written between November 1995 and December 1996,
De su pensamiento y protesta políticos:
-the power derived from faith in a simple idea: that all men and women have the right to a life that is free from fear and oppression.
-The authorities have the right to check at any time during the night to see if there are any unreported guests or if any of the members of the family are missing. [...] These periodic checks can be a mere formality conducted with courtesy or they can be a form of harassment. There is no lack of cases where the authorities have marched in at the dead of night and flung up mosquito nets to ascertain that the sleeping population tallied with the names and numbers on Form 10. Form 10 is the list of all the members of a family. In some households which comprise more than one nuclear family there may be more than one Form 10. Domestic employees who sleep at their employers’ homes also have to be registered on Form 10 or they have to be reported as guests. A person may be registered on only one Form 10, so if it is necessary for him to be entered as a member of another family for some reason, his name has to be removed from the original family list. [...] Form 10 played a central role in the daily lives of the people of Burma. In accordance with the household members listed on the form, it was decided how much a family was entitled to buy of such essentials as rice, oil, salt, chillies,
onions, soap and milk powder from the government co-operative.
-Unity in diversity has to be the principle of those who genuinely wish to build our country into a strong nation that allows a variety of races, languages, beliefs and cultures to flourish in peaceful and happy co-existence. Only a government that tolerates opinions and attitudes different from its own will be able to create an environment where peoples of diverse traditions and aspirations can breathe freely in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust. environment where peoples of diverse traditions and aspirations can breathe freely in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust.
-‘Teashop sitting’ students are more in the tradition of those young men and women who turned Rangoon University into a bastion of the independence movement before the Second World War, while their disco-going counterparts tend to look upon the yuppie as their role model.
-Hsayadaw (holy teacher) U Pandita spoke of the importance of samma-vaca or right speech. Not only should one speak only the truth, one’s speech should lead to harmony among beings, it should be kind and pleasant and it should be beneficial.
-(cuando vienen a tu casa para arrestarte) what they should take with them when the banging on the door comes: a change of clothing, soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, medicines, a blanket or two, et cetera, all in a plastic bag. Nothing so respectable as a knapsack or suitcase is permitted. And do not be fooled if the people who turn up at the door, usually without a warrant, say that they will only be keeping you for a few days. That could well translate into a twenty-year sentence.
Historia reciente:
-a prince who lived from the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries whom he saw as the first ruler of Burma to promote unity between the Shans and the Burmese.
-The National Day in Burma (It is the tenth day of the waning moon of the month of Tazaungdine). It is the anniversary of the boycott against the 1920 Rangoon University Act which was seen by the Burmese as a move to restrict higher education to a privileged few. This boycott, which was initiated by university students, gained widespread support and could be said to have been the first step in the movement for an independent Burma.
-27 March 1945 was the day when the people of Burma rose up in resistance against fascism.
-On 12 February 1947 an agreement was signed by Chin, Kachin and Shan leaders and by my father as the representative of the Burmese government. This agreement, which came to be known as the Panglong Agreement after the name of the town in the Shan State where it was signed, stated the belief that ‘freedom will be more speedily achieved by the Shans, the Kachins and the Chins by their immediate co-operation with the interim Burmese government’. [...] 12 February is designated Union Day.
-In 1947, on 19 July, six months before Burma was officially declared a sovereign independent nation, my father and several of his colleagues were assassinated while a meeting of the Governor’s Executive Council was in session.
-Burma became an independent nation in 1948,
-Fighting broke out between government troops and Karen insurgents almost as soon as Burma was declared an independent nation in January 1948.
-the military government that assumed power in 1962 took on a civilian garb under the Burma Socialist Programme Party,
-On 2 March 1962, the democratically elected government was removed by a military coup and state power passed into the hands of the Revolutionary Council headed by General U Ne Win. [...] on 7 July when soldiers were ordered to open fire on the students. The exact number and nature of the casualties on that fatal day still remain in dispute; it was officially declared that only sixteen students had been killed, but there are claims that the number of dead was well over one hundred.
-they wanted no more of the authoritarian rule, initiated by a military coup in 1962,
-where in 1988 public demonstrations erupted that eventually spread across the country. The people of Burma were tired of the authoritarian rule of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) that had turned their country, once seen as the fastest-developing nation in South-East Asia, into one of the poorest in the world.
-Dr Maung Maung, was the first head of state Burma had known in nearly three decades who had not come into government from the ranks of the military. For a while the people hoped their demands for democracy would be met speedily. However, on 18 September troops once again fired on unarmed demonstrators and the military took over the administration of the country. The new junta assumed what has often been described as an Orwellian title: the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC.
-The SLORC proclaimed that it was not interested in holding on to power for long and that it would establish multi-party democracy in Burma within a short period of time. Political parties were required to register with the Multi-party Elections Commission which was charged with the responsibility of organizing free and fair elections. More than 200 parties registered, among them the National League for Democracy (NLD).
-The SLORC had announced that the military powers would observe a strictly neutral position but it soon became evident that the National Unity Party, as the BSPP had decided to restyle itself, was very much the favoured political organization.
-the outgoing Chairman declared that a decision should be made as to whether the country should continue under one-party rule or whether it should opt for a multi-party system.
-The elections of May 1990 were hailed as one of the freest and fairest ever and the NLD won 82 per cent of the seats. As this was not the result SLORC had expected it decided to forget its earlier promise and brought out Notification 1/90 (another nice Orwellian touch), according to which the job of the elected representatives was merely to draw up a state constitution. But once the NLD and other political parties had been made to sign an undertaking to abide by this notification, SLORC proceeded to organize a National Convention in which less than one fifth of the delegates were elected representatives of the people.
-The NLD (National League for Democracy, the political party the author belongs) was victorious in an overwhelming 82 per cent of the constituencies during the elections of May 1990. This led not to a transfer to democratic government as the people expected but to a series of intensive measures aimed at debilitating the party.
-Within a matter of days it became sufficiently clear that the new administration under President U Sein Lwin had no intention of abolishing one-party dictatorship.
-It was some two months after the elections when SLORC still showed no signs of relinquishing power, or of convening Parliament, that a climate of unease began to set in.
Geografía:
-Pegu (actual Bago). Once it was a capital city of the Mons and also of King Bayinnaung, the one Burmese monarch who left the heartland to settle in the south, demonstrating a rare interest in the world beyond the confines of his original home. Nowadays Pegu no longer has a royal air, but it is still graced by the Shwemawdaw Pagoda and by a huge reclining image of the Buddha, the Shwethalyaung.
- (De la 'golden rock') In the vicinity of Kyaik-hto is the Kyaik-htiyoe pagoda. It is only fifteen feet in height but it is one of the most famous religious monuments in Burma because it is built on a large skull-shaped rock amazingly balanced on the edge of a jutting crag 3600 feet above sea level. Its perch is so precarious that the push of one strong man can set it rocking gently. Yet it has managed to maintain its equilibrium over many centuries.
-In Pagan today there still remains the Manuha stupa with a dedication by the captive king praying that he might never again, in any of his future lives, be defeated.
-In some of the hills are caves in which old Mon inscriptions, images and pagodas have been found. It was in one of these caves that a queen of Manuha took refuge after the defeat of her husband.
Economía:
-rubber was one of the main export products of Burma. But over the last few decades our rubber industry gradually declined and now rubber no longer features among our important natural assets.
-The official rate of exchange for one US dollar is less than six kyats but in recent weeks official exchange centres have been opened where Foreign Exchange Certificates (FECs) can be exchanged at the more realistic rate of 120 kyats to the dollar.
-The basic monthly salary of the lowest echelon of civil servant, such as a junior policeman, which is 600 kyats, hardly sufficient to feed a family of four for a week.
-If businessmen do not care about the numbers of political prisoners in our country, they should at least be concerned that the lack of an effective legal framework means there is no guarantee of fair business practice or, in cases of injustice, reparation. If businessmen do not care that our standards of health and education are deteriorating, they should at least be concerned that the lack of a healthy, educated labour force will inevitably thwart sound economic development. If businessmen do not care that we have to struggle with the difficulties of a system that gives scant attention to the well-being of the people, they should at least be concerned that the lack of necessary infrastructure and an underpaid and thereby corrupt bureaucracy hampers quick, efficient transactions. If businessmen do not care that our workers are exposed to exploitation, they should at least be concerned that a dissatisfied labour force will eventually mean social unrest and economic instability. [...] Among these despoilers are big Japanese companies. But they do not represent the best of Japan. I have met groups of Japanese, both young and old, anxious to find out for themselves the true state of affairs in our country, prepared to look straight at both the beautiful and the ugly.
Tradiciones:
-Breakfast for many people in Burma is fried rice. Usually it is a mixture of cooked rice and other leftovers from the evening before, vegetables, meat or shrimps; sometimes an egg or two is stirred into it; sometimes there might be a sprinkling of thinly sliced Chinese pork sausage; sometimes a variety of steamed beans sold by vendors in the early hours of the morning might be added. It is a fairly substantial and tasty meal.
-(sobre la tealeaf salad) There is also pickled tea leaves, laphet, soaked in good oil and served with such garnishes as sesame seeds, dried shrimps, roasted beans, peanuts and crisp fried garlic. It is indispensable as a traditional offering of hospitality, either as a conclusion to a meal or as a savoury snack to be taken with green tea in between meals.
-There are the better known festivals such as Thingyan (the water festival) in April and Thidingyut (the light festival) in October
-It is during this hot and draining month that the Burmese New Year falls. And fittingly the prelude to the New Year is a water festival. The name of the festival is Thingyan. ‘Thingyan’ denotes a changeover and the suffix ‘maha’, great, is often added to indicate the major change from an old to a new year which the festival celebrates. We also use the suffix ‘ata’, ending, [...] And many Burmese, especially those belonging to the older generation, would sadly admit that it can no longer be claimed that ‘the slightest indecency is never shown’ during the festival, especially since alcoholic excess has come to be associated with thingyan.
-Some people spend the period of the water festival in meditating, worshipping at pagodas, observing the eight precepts, releasing caged birds and fishes and performing other meritorious deeds. Children are told that Sakya comes down from his heavenly abode to wander in the human world during the days of Thingyan, carrying with him two large books, one bound in gold and the other bound in dog leather. The names of those who perform meritorious acts are entered in the golden book while the names of those who do not behave properly are noted down in the dog leather tome. It is especially important not to get angry during Thingyan or to make others angry.
-A traditional part of the water festival has disappeared in recent years: the Thingyan thangyat, rhyming choruses that provide pungently witty commentaries on topical subjects, particularly on the government. It was a way of allowing people to let off steam healthily once a year and also a way of allowing sensible governments to find out how the people truly feel about them. But the SLORC is incapable of coping with criticism. Members of the NLD who sang such choruses in 1989 were imprisoned. disappeared in recent years: the Thingyan thangyat, rhyming choruses that provide pungently witty commentaries on topical subjects, particularly on the government. It was a way of allowing people to let off steam healthily once a year and also a way of allowing sensible governments to find out how the people truly feel about them. But the SLORC is incapable of coping with criticism. Members of the NLD who sang such choruses in 1989 were imprisoned.
-Satuditha. This is a Pali expression meaning the four directions, and satuditha is the charitable act of offering free food or drink to those who come from the four points of the compass, that is to say, to all comers.
-as Buddhists most of the people of the country know of the Noble Eightfold Path and the eight victories of Lord Buddha.
-Whether it is the Muslim Id, the Hindu Divali, the Chinese New Year or Christmas, the Burmese are quite ready to take part in the fun and feasting.
-In Burma there is no prejudice against girl babies. In fact, there is a general belief that daughters are more dutiful and loving than sons and many Burmese parents welcome the birth of a daughter as an assurance that they will have somebody to take care of them in their old age.
-It is customary for Burmese Buddhist boys to spend some time as novices in a monastery that they might learn the basic tenets of Buddhism and bring merit to their parents who are responsible for arranging their ordination.
-many Burmese men when they have passed the age of twenty enter the religious order again for varying periods of time as fully ordained monks.
-the kathina ceremony, of which the major feature is the offering of new robes,
Aparte:
-(Sobre canciones nacionalistas burmesas) The most popular of these was Nagani, ‘Red Dragon’. Nagani was the name of a book club founded by a group of young politicians in 1937 with the intention of making works on politics, economics, history and literature accessible to the people of Burma.
-Many of the songs of the armed forces of Burma date back to the days of the Second World War and have Burmese lyrics put to Japanese tunes.
-(Sobre U Kyi Maung, del NLD)A staunch believer in the importance of an apolitical, professional army, he was strongly opposed to the military takeover of 1962.
-The years during which U Win Tin was Chief Editor of the Hanthawaddy were years which saw the consolidation of the Burmese Way to Socialism. Progressive restrictions were placed on free speech and expression but a handful of writers and journalists quietly persisted in preserving their right to intellectual freedom.
-Bohmu Aung, a hale octogenarian who had been one of the Thirty Comrades, a group of young men led by my father who received military training from the Japanese army on Hainan Island in 1941.
-The tea ceremony with its spirit of wakei seijaku (harmony, respect, quietness and tranquillity) illustrated the necessity of removing all that is ugly or disharmonious before reaching out to a beauty that is both visual and spiritual.
-undertake the Eight Precepts is to abstain from taking life, taking what is not given, wrong conduct in sexual desires, telling lies, drinking alcohol, taking solid food after midday, dressing in any colour but plain white, and sleeping in high or big beds.
-This is based on the Buddhist story of Padasari, the daughter of rich parents who ran away to a far place with one of her house slaves. After bearing two sons, she was filled with such longing to see her parents that she asked her husband to take her back home. On the journey, she lost her husband and both children in a series of tragic incidents. She managed to continue on to the land where her parents lived only to discover that her whole family – father, mother, and brother – had died and had just been cremated. The unfortunate young woman lost her mind and wandered around in a state of mad grief until the Lord Buddha taught her how to achieve peace of mind. Padasari is seen as the epitome of the consuming fire of extreme grief. But her tale is essentially one of supreme joy: the joy of victory over the self. There are many pictures that depict Padasari’s frantic despair at the loss of her husband and sons, often against a backdrop of rain and storm.
-According to the teachings of Buddhism, a good friend is one who gives things hard to give, does what is hard, bears hard words, tells you his secrets, guards your secrets assiduously, does not forsake you in times of want and does not condemn you when you are ruined. With such friends, one can travel the roughest road and not be defeated by hardship. Indeed, the rougher the path, the greater the delight in the company of kalyanamitta, good and noble friends who stand by us in times of adversity.
De piano tuner:
Sobre la historia:
-since our occupation of the coastal states of Burma sixty years ago, through the recent annexation of Mandalay and Upper Burma, Her Majesty has seen the occupation and pacification of the territory as central to the security of our Empire throughout Asia. Despite our military victories, several developments seriously endanger our Burmese possessions. Recent intelligence reports have confirmed the consolidation of French forces along the Mekong River in Indo-China, while within Burma local insurgence threatens our hold on the remoter regions of the country. [...] we risk invasion, French or even Siamese.
-He had known of the Anglo-Burmese wars, conflicts notable both for their brevity and for the considerable territorial gains wrested from the Burmese kings following each victory: the coastal states of Arakan and Tenasserim following the first war, Rangoon and Lower Burma following the second, Upper Burma and the Shan States following the third. And while the first two wars, which ended in 1826 and 1853, he had learned about at school, the third had been reported in the newspapers last year, and the final annexation announced only in January. But, beyond the general histories, most of the details were unfamiliar: that the second war began ostensibly over the kidnapping of two British sea captains, that the third stemmed in part from tension following the refusal of British emissaries to remove their shoes on entering an audience with the Burmese King.
-he focused his attention mainly on the history of the most recent king, named Thibaw, who had been deposed and exiled to India after British troops seized Mandalay. He was, by the army’s account, a weak and ineffective leader, manipulated by his wife and mother-in-law, and his reign had been marred by increasing lawlessness in the remoter districts, evidenced by a plague of attacks by armed bands of dacoits,
-the Shan revolt against British rule finds its beginnings in an incipient revolt against a Burman king.
-The Shan, who refer to themselves as the Tai or Thai, share a common historical heritage with their eastern neighbours, the Siamese, the Lao and the Yunnanese. The Shan believe their ancestral home was in southern China. [...] at the time of the Mongol invasions, the Tai-Thai people had established a number of kingdoms. These included the fabled Yunnanese kingdom of Xipsongbanna, whose name means ‘Kingdom of ten thousand rice fields’, the ancient Siamese capital at Sukhothai, and – more importantly for the subject of this briefing – two kingdoms within the present borders of Burma: the kingdom of Tai Mao in the north and the kingdom of Ava in the vicinity of present-day Mandalay.
-the Shan ruled much of Burma for over three centuries, from the fall of the great Burman capital of Pagan (whose vast wind-worn temples still sit in lonely vigil on the banks of the Irrawaddy River) at the turn of the thirteenth century, until 1555, when the Burman state of Pegu eclipsed the Shan empire at Ava, [...] Following the fall of the Shan kingdom of Ava in 1555 and the destruction of the Tai Mao kingdom by Chinese invaders in 1604, the Shan splintered into small principalities. [...] his fragmentation continues to mark the Shan States to this day. Despite this general disunity, however, the Shan were occasionally able to mobilize against their common Burman enemy, notably in a popular Shan revolt in Hanthawaddy in 1564 or, more recently, in a rebellion following the execution of a popular leader in the northern Shan city of Hsenwi. [...] Shan principalities (of which there were forty-one by the 1870s) were the highest order of political organization in a highly hierarchical system of local rule. Such principalities, termed muang by the Shan, were ruled by a sawbwa (Burmese transliteration, which I will adopt in the remainder of this report). [...] just as fragments of porcelain cannot hold water, so the fragments of governments could do little to control a growing anarchy. As a result, much of the Shan countryside is plagued by bands of dacoits (a Hindustani word meaning bandits), a great challenge to the administration of this region, although distinct from the organized resistance known as the Limbin Confederacy,
-In 1880 an organized Shan movement against Burmese rule emerged, which still persists today. (Note that at this time England only controlled Lower Burma. Upper Burma and Mandalay were still ruled by the Burmese King.) In that year the sawbwas of the states of Mongnai, Lawksawk, Mongpawn and Mongnawng refused to appear before the Burmese King Thibaw in an annual act of New Year’s obeisance. A column sent by Thibaw failed to capture the upstart sawbwas. Then, in 1882, this defiance became violent. In that year, the sawbwa of Kengtung attacked and killed the Burmese Resident in Kengtung. Inspired by the boldness of the Kengtung sawbwa, the sawbwa of Mongnai and his allies broke into open revolt. In November 1883 they attacked the Burmese garrison at Mongnai, killing four hundred. But their success was short-lived. The Burmese counter-attacked, forcing the rebellious Shan chiefs to flee to Kengtung, across the Salween River, whose steep defiles and dense jungles gave them shelter against further incursions. [...] Their chief goal was the overthrow of Thibaw, and the crowning of a suzerain who would repeal the thathameda tax, a land tax they deemed unjust. Thus, as their candidate, they selected a Burman known as the Limbin Prince, a disenfranchised member of the House of Alaungpaya, the ruling dynasty. This rebellion became known as the Limbin Confederacy. In December 1885 the Limbin Prince arrived in Kengtung. Although the movement carries his name, evidence suggests he is only a figurehead, with true power being wielded by the Shan sawbwas. Meanwhile, as the Limbin Prince followed the lonely trails into the highlands, war had broken out once again between Upper Burma and Britain: the Third and final Anglo-Burmese War. The defeat of the Burmese at Mandalay by our forces was completed two weeks before the Limbin Prince arrived in Kengtung, but because of the vast and difficult terrain separating Kengtung from Mandalay, the news failed to reach the Confederacy until after he arrived. While we had hoped that the Limbin Confederacy would drop its resistance and submit to our rule, instead it switched its original aims and declared war on the British Crown in the name of Shan independence.-Before the Sepoy Rebellion, when our holdings in Burma were administered by the East India Company, opium use was even encouraged – the trade was quite lucrative. But there has always been a call to prohibit or tax it by those who object to its ‘‘corrupting influences’’. Last year the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade requested that the Viceroy ban the trade. Their request was rejected quietly. This was no surprise; it is one of our largest cash crops in India. And banning it really does nothing. The merchants just start smuggling the drug by sea. The smugglers are actually rather clever. They put the opium in bags and tie them to blocks of salt. If the ships are searched, they merely drop the cargo into the water. After a certain time the salt dissolves and the package floats back to the surface.’ [...] ‘Approve of what? Of opium? It is one of the best medicines that I have, an antidote for pain, diarrhoea, coughing, perhaps the most common symptoms of the diseases I see here. Anyone who wishes to make policies on such subjects should come here first.’
Sobre geografía:
-‘the Shan States’ consists of a large plateau that floats to the east above the dusty central valley of the Irrawaddy River. It is a vast and green Elysian plain, which extends north to the border of Yunnan and east to Siam.
-the ruins of Pagan, the ancient capital of a kingdom that had ruled Burma for centuries.
-pass the old capital of Amarapura, which means ‘City of the Immortals’.
-Ayutthaya, the old capital of Siam.
-the Straits of Bab al Mandab, (estrecho entre Yemen y Djibouti que da comienzo al Mar Rojo)
-They dropped anchor in the port of Aden, where the harbour was full with steamers destined for all over the world,
Sobre tradiciones burmesas:
-‘They call it thanaka. It is made from ground sandalwood. Almost all the women wear it and many of the men. They cover the babies with it too.’ ‘Whatever for?’ ‘Protects against the sun, they say, makes them beautiful. We call it “Burmese face powder”. Why do English women wear face powder?’
-Cheroot (los puros birmanos)
-as monks should not eat after noon.
-‘What’s a pwè? You are in for a wonderful treat. Burmese street theatre, [...] ‘A pwè,’ began the Captain, before they were out the door, ‘is uniquely Burmese and I might even say Mandalayan, for here the art is at its finest. There are many reasons to hold a pwè, for births or for deaths, for namings, when Burmese girls have their first ear piercing, when young men become monks, when they stop being monks, when pagodas are dedicated. Or even non-religious reasons: if one wins a lucky bet, builds a house or even digs a well, when there is a good harvest, a boxing match, when a fire balloon is released. Anything else you can think of. A propitious event and a man holds a pwè. [...] There are many types of pwè. There is the ahlu pwè, a pwè sponsored by a rich man to commemorate a religious festival or the entry of his son into the monastery. They are usually the best as he can afford to hire the finest actors. Then there are the subscription pwè, when a member of a neighbourhood will collect money from others and pool it to hire a pwè company then an a-yein pwè, a dance performance, then the kyigyin pwè, a free performance offered by an actor or company trying to make their name famous. And then of course, the yôkthe pwè, puppets. [...] there is the zat pwè, or real story, a religious play that tells one of the stories of the Buddha’s lives. There are many of these as the Buddha had five hundred and ten incarnations, although, only ten are usually performed, the so-called Zatgyi Sèbwè, dramas about how the Buddha overcame each of the deadly sins. That is what is playing tonight: the Nemi zat is the fifth,’ ‘Fourth,’ ‘Thank you, Khin Myo, the fourth Zatgyi Sèbwè. ‘This one is about Prince Nemi, one of the Buddha’s incarnations, who is born into a long line of Burmese kings. As a young man, Prince Nemi is so pious that the spirits decide to invite him to see heaven. One moonlit night, perhaps very much like tonight, they send a chariot down to earth. I can only imagine the awe of Prince Nemi and his people as they watch the chariot descend, and fall before it, trembling with fear. The Prince boards it, and it disappears, leaving only the moon. The chariot takes Nemi first to the heavens, where the nats live – nats are Burmese folk spirits, even good Buddhists believe they are everywhere – and then to Nga-yè, the underworld where the serpents called nagas dwell. At last he returns reluctantly to his world to share the wonders he has seen. The finale is quite sad: it was the tradition of the kings that when they grew old and sensed that death was near they left their homes and travelled into the desert to die as hermits. And so one day Nemi, like his forefathers before him, wanders into the mountains to die.’
Sobre las etnias:
-Ask any child of the Shan, or the Wa, or the Pa-O,
-hypnotic words he would later learn were not Burmese but Pali.
-Palaung, Paduang, Danu, Shan, Pa-O, Wa, Kachin, Karen, Karenni. And those are just some of the biggest tribes.’
-to remove a Shan’s turban in life is a mortal insult.
-Som tae-tae kwa means ‘Thank you.’
Sobre pianos:
-following its invention by Cristofori in the early eighteenth century, the piano underwent great modifications, and the Erard, the subject of this letter, is indebted, as all modern pianos are, to this tremendous tradition.
-Sebastien Erard was from Strasbourg, a German, but he went to Paris in 1768 when he was sixteen and apprenticed himself to a harpsichord maker. The boy – to put it simply – was a prodigy and soon he quit his apprenticeship and opened his own shop. The other Parisian craftsmen felt so threatened by the boy’s gift that they launched a campaign to have him close his shop after he designed a clavecin mécanique, a harpsichord with multiple registers, with quill and cowhide plectra, all operated by an ingenious pedal mechanism which had never been thought of before. But, despite the boycott, the design was so impressive that the Duchess of Villeroi gave the young Erard her sponsorship. Erard started to make pianofortes, and the Duchess’s noble friends started to buy them. This time he aroused the ire of importers who resented the competition with their imported English pianos. They tried to raid his house, only to be blocked by none other than soldiers of Louis XVI; Erard was so renowned that the King gave him full licence to trade.
- (cuando afina el piano) he then turned to the notes that lay in between, to set them in equal temperament, so that the notes were all equally spaced along the octave. It was a concept apprentices often found difficult to understand. Each note produces a sound at a particular frequency, he would explain, strings in tune with one another can harmonize, while out-of-tune strings produce frequencies which overlap to produce a rhythmic pulse, known as a beat, a synchrony of slightly discordant sounds. On a piano tuned perfectly in a particular key, there should be no beats when correct intervals are played. But then it is impossible to play the piano in any other key. Equal temperament was an innovation that allowed for more than one key to be played on a single instrument, the sacrifice being that no key would be in perfect tune. To tune in equal temperament meant deliberately creating beats, adjusting the strings finely so that only a well-trained ear could discern that they were slightly, if necessarily, out of tune.
-Bach’s prelude and fugue in C sharp minor, the fourth piece of Bach’s collections of preludes and fugues known as The Well-Tempered Clavier, or as simply The Forty-Eight after the number of prelude variations, which are arranged into two books, each of twenty-four chapters.
-“Allegro con brio” of Haydn’s Sonata No. 50 in D major’.
-‘Clementi, Sonata in F sharp minor,’
-the song is but an elaboration of one simple melody, we are destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines.
Aparte:
-Edgar keeps so few secrets that those he does become lies.
-he had learned early that being needed was not the same as being accepted.
-Mae Lwin?’ ‘Mae is a Shan word for river. It is the same in Siamese.’
-most Europeans think the disease is caused by breathing bad air from the swamps, which is why the Italians named the disease ‘‘mala aria’’, ‘‘bad air’’.
-Death from cobra bite is terrible: the venom paralyses the diaphragm so the patient suffocates. It took but half an hour for him to die. In Burma few snakes other than the Asian cobra kill so fast. A Shan remedy for snake bites is to tie off the wound, which we did (although all knew that this would be to little avail), to suck on the wound (which I did), and to apply a paste of pounded spiders (but we had none and, in truth, I have always doubted the efficacy of this cure).
-King Mindon (penultimate king of Burma)
-(sobre la Odisea) I always read it as a tragic tale of Odysseus’s struggle to find his way home. Now I understand more and more what Dante and Tennyson wrote about it, that he wasn’t lost, but that after the wonders he had seen Odysseus couldn’t, perhaps didn’t want to, return home.’
De la bibliografía usada por Daniel Manson en el afinador de pianos:
-The Burman, the first academic piece I read on the country and the inspiration for much of the cultural background to my story.
-The Making of Modern Burma (2001) is worth noting for its discussion of the Anglo-Burmese wars,
De Letters from Burma:
Sobre la autora (cogido del prólogo): why there is such a well-spring of feeling for Aung San Suu Kyi. After all, she has been actively involved at the forefront of Burmese politics for less than a decade – nothing like the lifetime of political struggle of her fellow Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela. Perhaps the most eloquent answer to my question came from an old man, standing drenched to the skin outside Aung San Suu Kyi’s house on the day after her release. ‘We come here because we know that we are the most important thing in the world to her. She cares about us.’ To a people who suffer continually the brutality of one of the world’s most odious regimes, the notion that a leader might actually care about them, and risk her own freedom to fight for theirs, is indeed unusual. [...] I began to appreciate the singular qualities which inspired such devotion among her followers. Chief among the attributes which make her a remarkable leader in our times is a deep humanity, a gift for understanding and embracing the pain of others as if it were her own. Much of her time these days is spent listening to the voices of ordinary people, who risk arrest by coming to her compound to talk about their problems. Poverty, military oppression, the hunger for arable land, all are discussed with the supplicants who come to the house by the lake. None are turned away without being given a hearing. [...] these wonderful letters from Burma, written between November 1995 and December 1996,
De su pensamiento y protesta políticos:
-the power derived from faith in a simple idea: that all men and women have the right to a life that is free from fear and oppression.
-The authorities have the right to check at any time during the night to see if there are any unreported guests or if any of the members of the family are missing. [...] These periodic checks can be a mere formality conducted with courtesy or they can be a form of harassment. There is no lack of cases where the authorities have marched in at the dead of night and flung up mosquito nets to ascertain that the sleeping population tallied with the names and numbers on Form 10. Form 10 is the list of all the members of a family. In some households which comprise more than one nuclear family there may be more than one Form 10. Domestic employees who sleep at their employers’ homes also have to be registered on Form 10 or they have to be reported as guests. A person may be registered on only one Form 10, so if it is necessary for him to be entered as a member of another family for some reason, his name has to be removed from the original family list. [...] Form 10 played a central role in the daily lives of the people of Burma. In accordance with the household members listed on the form, it was decided how much a family was entitled to buy of such essentials as rice, oil, salt, chillies,
onions, soap and milk powder from the government co-operative.
-Unity in diversity has to be the principle of those who genuinely wish to build our country into a strong nation that allows a variety of races, languages, beliefs and cultures to flourish in peaceful and happy co-existence. Only a government that tolerates opinions and attitudes different from its own will be able to create an environment where peoples of diverse traditions and aspirations can breathe freely in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust. environment where peoples of diverse traditions and aspirations can breathe freely in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust.
-‘Teashop sitting’ students are more in the tradition of those young men and women who turned Rangoon University into a bastion of the independence movement before the Second World War, while their disco-going counterparts tend to look upon the yuppie as their role model.
-Hsayadaw (holy teacher) U Pandita spoke of the importance of samma-vaca or right speech. Not only should one speak only the truth, one’s speech should lead to harmony among beings, it should be kind and pleasant and it should be beneficial.
-(cuando vienen a tu casa para arrestarte) what they should take with them when the banging on the door comes: a change of clothing, soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, medicines, a blanket or two, et cetera, all in a plastic bag. Nothing so respectable as a knapsack or suitcase is permitted. And do not be fooled if the people who turn up at the door, usually without a warrant, say that they will only be keeping you for a few days. That could well translate into a twenty-year sentence.
Historia reciente:
-a prince who lived from the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries whom he saw as the first ruler of Burma to promote unity between the Shans and the Burmese.
-The National Day in Burma (It is the tenth day of the waning moon of the month of Tazaungdine). It is the anniversary of the boycott against the 1920 Rangoon University Act which was seen by the Burmese as a move to restrict higher education to a privileged few. This boycott, which was initiated by university students, gained widespread support and could be said to have been the first step in the movement for an independent Burma.
-27 March 1945 was the day when the people of Burma rose up in resistance against fascism.
-On 12 February 1947 an agreement was signed by Chin, Kachin and Shan leaders and by my father as the representative of the Burmese government. This agreement, which came to be known as the Panglong Agreement after the name of the town in the Shan State where it was signed, stated the belief that ‘freedom will be more speedily achieved by the Shans, the Kachins and the Chins by their immediate co-operation with the interim Burmese government’. [...] 12 February is designated Union Day.
-In 1947, on 19 July, six months before Burma was officially declared a sovereign independent nation, my father and several of his colleagues were assassinated while a meeting of the Governor’s Executive Council was in session.
-Burma became an independent nation in 1948,
-Fighting broke out between government troops and Karen insurgents almost as soon as Burma was declared an independent nation in January 1948.
-the military government that assumed power in 1962 took on a civilian garb under the Burma Socialist Programme Party,
-On 2 March 1962, the democratically elected government was removed by a military coup and state power passed into the hands of the Revolutionary Council headed by General U Ne Win. [...] on 7 July when soldiers were ordered to open fire on the students. The exact number and nature of the casualties on that fatal day still remain in dispute; it was officially declared that only sixteen students had been killed, but there are claims that the number of dead was well over one hundred.
-they wanted no more of the authoritarian rule, initiated by a military coup in 1962,
-where in 1988 public demonstrations erupted that eventually spread across the country. The people of Burma were tired of the authoritarian rule of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) that had turned their country, once seen as the fastest-developing nation in South-East Asia, into one of the poorest in the world.
-Dr Maung Maung, was the first head of state Burma had known in nearly three decades who had not come into government from the ranks of the military. For a while the people hoped their demands for democracy would be met speedily. However, on 18 September troops once again fired on unarmed demonstrators and the military took over the administration of the country. The new junta assumed what has often been described as an Orwellian title: the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC.
-The SLORC proclaimed that it was not interested in holding on to power for long and that it would establish multi-party democracy in Burma within a short period of time. Political parties were required to register with the Multi-party Elections Commission which was charged with the responsibility of organizing free and fair elections. More than 200 parties registered, among them the National League for Democracy (NLD).
-The SLORC had announced that the military powers would observe a strictly neutral position but it soon became evident that the National Unity Party, as the BSPP had decided to restyle itself, was very much the favoured political organization.
-the outgoing Chairman declared that a decision should be made as to whether the country should continue under one-party rule or whether it should opt for a multi-party system.
-The elections of May 1990 were hailed as one of the freest and fairest ever and the NLD won 82 per cent of the seats. As this was not the result SLORC had expected it decided to forget its earlier promise and brought out Notification 1/90 (another nice Orwellian touch), according to which the job of the elected representatives was merely to draw up a state constitution. But once the NLD and other political parties had been made to sign an undertaking to abide by this notification, SLORC proceeded to organize a National Convention in which less than one fifth of the delegates were elected representatives of the people.
-The NLD (National League for Democracy, the political party the author belongs) was victorious in an overwhelming 82 per cent of the constituencies during the elections of May 1990. This led not to a transfer to democratic government as the people expected but to a series of intensive measures aimed at debilitating the party.
-Within a matter of days it became sufficiently clear that the new administration under President U Sein Lwin had no intention of abolishing one-party dictatorship.
-It was some two months after the elections when SLORC still showed no signs of relinquishing power, or of convening Parliament, that a climate of unease began to set in.
Geografía:
-Pegu (actual Bago). Once it was a capital city of the Mons and also of King Bayinnaung, the one Burmese monarch who left the heartland to settle in the south, demonstrating a rare interest in the world beyond the confines of his original home. Nowadays Pegu no longer has a royal air, but it is still graced by the Shwemawdaw Pagoda and by a huge reclining image of the Buddha, the Shwethalyaung.
- (De la 'golden rock') In the vicinity of Kyaik-hto is the Kyaik-htiyoe pagoda. It is only fifteen feet in height but it is one of the most famous religious monuments in Burma because it is built on a large skull-shaped rock amazingly balanced on the edge of a jutting crag 3600 feet above sea level. Its perch is so precarious that the push of one strong man can set it rocking gently. Yet it has managed to maintain its equilibrium over many centuries.
-In Pagan today there still remains the Manuha stupa with a dedication by the captive king praying that he might never again, in any of his future lives, be defeated.
-In some of the hills are caves in which old Mon inscriptions, images and pagodas have been found. It was in one of these caves that a queen of Manuha took refuge after the defeat of her husband.
Economía:
-rubber was one of the main export products of Burma. But over the last few decades our rubber industry gradually declined and now rubber no longer features among our important natural assets.
-The official rate of exchange for one US dollar is less than six kyats but in recent weeks official exchange centres have been opened where Foreign Exchange Certificates (FECs) can be exchanged at the more realistic rate of 120 kyats to the dollar.
-The basic monthly salary of the lowest echelon of civil servant, such as a junior policeman, which is 600 kyats, hardly sufficient to feed a family of four for a week.
-If businessmen do not care about the numbers of political prisoners in our country, they should at least be concerned that the lack of an effective legal framework means there is no guarantee of fair business practice or, in cases of injustice, reparation. If businessmen do not care that our standards of health and education are deteriorating, they should at least be concerned that the lack of a healthy, educated labour force will inevitably thwart sound economic development. If businessmen do not care that we have to struggle with the difficulties of a system that gives scant attention to the well-being of the people, they should at least be concerned that the lack of necessary infrastructure and an underpaid and thereby corrupt bureaucracy hampers quick, efficient transactions. If businessmen do not care that our workers are exposed to exploitation, they should at least be concerned that a dissatisfied labour force will eventually mean social unrest and economic instability. [...] Among these despoilers are big Japanese companies. But they do not represent the best of Japan. I have met groups of Japanese, both young and old, anxious to find out for themselves the true state of affairs in our country, prepared to look straight at both the beautiful and the ugly.
Tradiciones:
-Breakfast for many people in Burma is fried rice. Usually it is a mixture of cooked rice and other leftovers from the evening before, vegetables, meat or shrimps; sometimes an egg or two is stirred into it; sometimes there might be a sprinkling of thinly sliced Chinese pork sausage; sometimes a variety of steamed beans sold by vendors in the early hours of the morning might be added. It is a fairly substantial and tasty meal.
-(sobre la tealeaf salad) There is also pickled tea leaves, laphet, soaked in good oil and served with such garnishes as sesame seeds, dried shrimps, roasted beans, peanuts and crisp fried garlic. It is indispensable as a traditional offering of hospitality, either as a conclusion to a meal or as a savoury snack to be taken with green tea in between meals.
-There are the better known festivals such as Thingyan (the water festival) in April and Thidingyut (the light festival) in October
-It is during this hot and draining month that the Burmese New Year falls. And fittingly the prelude to the New Year is a water festival. The name of the festival is Thingyan. ‘Thingyan’ denotes a changeover and the suffix ‘maha’, great, is often added to indicate the major change from an old to a new year which the festival celebrates. We also use the suffix ‘ata’, ending, [...] And many Burmese, especially those belonging to the older generation, would sadly admit that it can no longer be claimed that ‘the slightest indecency is never shown’ during the festival, especially since alcoholic excess has come to be associated with thingyan.
-Some people spend the period of the water festival in meditating, worshipping at pagodas, observing the eight precepts, releasing caged birds and fishes and performing other meritorious deeds. Children are told that Sakya comes down from his heavenly abode to wander in the human world during the days of Thingyan, carrying with him two large books, one bound in gold and the other bound in dog leather. The names of those who perform meritorious acts are entered in the golden book while the names of those who do not behave properly are noted down in the dog leather tome. It is especially important not to get angry during Thingyan or to make others angry.
-A traditional part of the water festival has disappeared in recent years: the Thingyan thangyat, rhyming choruses that provide pungently witty commentaries on topical subjects, particularly on the government. It was a way of allowing people to let off steam healthily once a year and also a way of allowing sensible governments to find out how the people truly feel about them. But the SLORC is incapable of coping with criticism. Members of the NLD who sang such choruses in 1989 were imprisoned. disappeared in recent years: the Thingyan thangyat, rhyming choruses that provide pungently witty commentaries on topical subjects, particularly on the government. It was a way of allowing people to let off steam healthily once a year and also a way of allowing sensible governments to find out how the people truly feel about them. But the SLORC is incapable of coping with criticism. Members of the NLD who sang such choruses in 1989 were imprisoned.
-Satuditha. This is a Pali expression meaning the four directions, and satuditha is the charitable act of offering free food or drink to those who come from the four points of the compass, that is to say, to all comers.
-as Buddhists most of the people of the country know of the Noble Eightfold Path and the eight victories of Lord Buddha.
-Whether it is the Muslim Id, the Hindu Divali, the Chinese New Year or Christmas, the Burmese are quite ready to take part in the fun and feasting.
-In Burma there is no prejudice against girl babies. In fact, there is a general belief that daughters are more dutiful and loving than sons and many Burmese parents welcome the birth of a daughter as an assurance that they will have somebody to take care of them in their old age.
-It is customary for Burmese Buddhist boys to spend some time as novices in a monastery that they might learn the basic tenets of Buddhism and bring merit to their parents who are responsible for arranging their ordination.
-many Burmese men when they have passed the age of twenty enter the religious order again for varying periods of time as fully ordained monks.
-the kathina ceremony, of which the major feature is the offering of new robes,
Aparte:
-(Sobre canciones nacionalistas burmesas) The most popular of these was Nagani, ‘Red Dragon’. Nagani was the name of a book club founded by a group of young politicians in 1937 with the intention of making works on politics, economics, history and literature accessible to the people of Burma.
-Many of the songs of the armed forces of Burma date back to the days of the Second World War and have Burmese lyrics put to Japanese tunes.
-(Sobre U Kyi Maung, del NLD)A staunch believer in the importance of an apolitical, professional army, he was strongly opposed to the military takeover of 1962.
-The years during which U Win Tin was Chief Editor of the Hanthawaddy were years which saw the consolidation of the Burmese Way to Socialism. Progressive restrictions were placed on free speech and expression but a handful of writers and journalists quietly persisted in preserving their right to intellectual freedom.
-Bohmu Aung, a hale octogenarian who had been one of the Thirty Comrades, a group of young men led by my father who received military training from the Japanese army on Hainan Island in 1941.
-The tea ceremony with its spirit of wakei seijaku (harmony, respect, quietness and tranquillity) illustrated the necessity of removing all that is ugly or disharmonious before reaching out to a beauty that is both visual and spiritual.
-undertake the Eight Precepts is to abstain from taking life, taking what is not given, wrong conduct in sexual desires, telling lies, drinking alcohol, taking solid food after midday, dressing in any colour but plain white, and sleeping in high or big beds.
-This is based on the Buddhist story of Padasari, the daughter of rich parents who ran away to a far place with one of her house slaves. After bearing two sons, she was filled with such longing to see her parents that she asked her husband to take her back home. On the journey, she lost her husband and both children in a series of tragic incidents. She managed to continue on to the land where her parents lived only to discover that her whole family – father, mother, and brother – had died and had just been cremated. The unfortunate young woman lost her mind and wandered around in a state of mad grief until the Lord Buddha taught her how to achieve peace of mind. Padasari is seen as the epitome of the consuming fire of extreme grief. But her tale is essentially one of supreme joy: the joy of victory over the self. There are many pictures that depict Padasari’s frantic despair at the loss of her husband and sons, often against a backdrop of rain and storm.
-According to the teachings of Buddhism, a good friend is one who gives things hard to give, does what is hard, bears hard words, tells you his secrets, guards your secrets assiduously, does not forsake you in times of want and does not condemn you when you are ruined. With such friends, one can travel the roughest road and not be defeated by hardship. Indeed, the rougher the path, the greater the delight in the company of kalyanamitta, good and noble friends who stand by us in times of adversity.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)