Friday, July 29, 2011

ေသေသာ္မွတည့္ ေၾသာ္ ေကာင္း၏ - It's Better to Die than to Live



ေသေသာ္မွတည့္ ေၾသာ္ ေကာင္း၏ 


သိဃၤတန္ေဆာင္၊ ဘုန္းေတာ္ေမွာင္၍၊
ကုန္းေဘာင္ေနမီး၊ မထိန္ညီးက၊
တိုင္းၾကီးျပည္ၾကီး၊ အခ်ည္းႏွီးလွ်င္ (တည့္)၊

ထီးသုဥ္း နန္းသုဥ္း၊ ၿမိဳ႕သုဥ္းသုည၊
သုဥ္းသံုးဝျဖင့္၊ သုဥ္းရျပန္လစ္ (သုညရလစ္)၊
ေသေသာ္မွတည့္ ေၾသာ္ ေကာင္း၏ ... ။
သုညေခတ္ဝယ္၊ ျဖစ္လာရေလ၊
ဒို႔တေတြသည္ ..

ေသေသာ္မွတည့္ ေၾသာ္ ေကာင္း၏ ... ။

~ ဆီးဘန္နီ (ဆီးပန္းနီ) ဆရာေတာ္ ~
အာဇာနည္ စာဆုိအေက်ာ္ ဆီးဘန္နီ (ဆီးပန္းနီ) ဆရာေတာ္ ၏ ပါေတာ္မူတမ္းခ်င္း။


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's Better to Die than to Live



When magnificent influence and
Majestic authority
Of the Konbaung Dynasty diminished,
The country was thus in peril.

Ruler deported.
Authority departed.
Sovereignty deceased!
In the Age of Chaos & Anarchy,
So-called in the Zeor Era
It's better to die with honour
Than to live with shame.

Si Ban Ni Sayardaw
(A poem on deportation of the King Thibaw, who was the Last King of Konbaung Dynasty in Burma)

Trans:  Max | 30 July 2011

source: 

Thursday, July 28, 2011

THE KISS

DUR KUSS

I remember a gentle and warm kiss on my cheek.   And eyes with a very loving look too.  I believe I was enjoying the affectionate kiss on my cheek and I longed for more.  Without a doubt, it was one of the grateful and memorable moments of my life.  It was the first time I remembered my mom kissed me on my cheek.  It was so pleasant and a wonderful experience.  That’s how I learned about a kiss. A very affectionate kiss from a mother to her lovely son.    Every time I think of it, I feel good and nice.  It gives me energy and motivation.  So sweet!

In fact, there are many types of kiss – cheek kiss, French kiss, kiss of peace, kiss of respect, platonic kiss, romantic kiss, etc.   Wiki states that the word “a kiss” is a descendent of the old English word “cyssan" meaning “to kiss".  Many literatures and scientific research on human’s kissing are readily available online.  They all indicate only one thing in common – a kiss is an act of expression of affection and love of human beings.  Did Adam kiss Eve in the Garden of Eden?  Who teach Homo sapiens about kissing?  An origin of human’s kissing remains unknown.  Some scholars highlight that kissing is associated with the level of civilization.  Does it really matter?  No one cares and we kiss nevertheless to express affection and love to one another.  Kissing is in fact beneficial to our health as it involves movement of the lower jaw (the sole movable bone in the head) and contraction of 34 muscles in the face, neck and head -- principally the orbicularis orbis, which surrounds the mouth and allows the lips to pucker. There are top ten health benefits from kissing.  Another research indicates that 10% of human population does not know well about kissing.  May be they are also in need of expressing their loves to others too.       

Is a kiss considered a sin?  If so, love wouldn’t be preached to us in the first place.   A kiss is an act of love and a sign of affection.  No doubt, kiss is not a sin in any way.  Viktor Frankl said, love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.  To live and survive, love is essential.  And love and kiss is inseparable.  Kiss is thus also necessary for all human being.  It could be a kiss from a mother as well as from loved ones.  Life is tough and a long journey!  With love and sweet kisses along the way, I believe, life becomes a pleasant journey.

Max
26 July 2011   

References:
Picture: http://www.weddingcometrue.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/lip-kissing.jpg   

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Irrawaddy: the sole reason for existence of Myanmar




Though I wasn’t born in the caveman era, I can say for sure that today’s Myanmar (Burma) exist because of Irrawaddy.  It’s just a simple but plausible guess.  In those old days, cavemen look only for very basic things: food, shelter, water.  Irrawaddy attracts many cavemen’s along the way to gradually start our civilization.  As early as back in the 6th Century, Irrawaddy has been serving uncountable ancestors of Myanmar in many ways. If Irrawaddy were a person, she actually gives breastfeeding our ancestors and all of us.  Rice we have as a staple food is usually coming from the Irrawaddy’s delta aka the rice bowl of Myanmar.  Without making any complaint, she carries us on her back transport from lower to upper parts of the country.   In short, Irrawaddy helps Myanmar to grow and glow for centuries.  She is indeed our mother and Myanmar lifelong guardian angel.  She is so many things for so many people we owes her so very much in so many lives.  Now she is being threatened and in danger.  Some wants to take her away from you forever.

Today, millions of people talk about capricious climate changes in every corner of the world.  Most of these changes are resulted from, I believe, though I can’t quote statistically here, from many reckless actions by imprudent and irresponsible states’ actors i.e. governments.  Many of their actions tamper with nature and as a result millions of people suffer from the consequences arose. 

Most of the environmental problems we are facing today would have been avoided if many of states’ actors in old days take time to think long-term consequences prior to carrying out certain policies and particular actions which may have negative impact on nature and ecology.  Instead, in the race of development, nations take actions and formulate polices solely based on economic interest rather than the interests of the public or mother-nature.    
 “The Great Chinese Famine” aka “three bitter years” during Mao era in China in which both draught/bad weather & bad policies claimed more than 20 millions of people can be seen as an example of state’s actions based on economic interest.  Not only China, but also US which now have spending great deal of tax payers’ money on fixing the problems created by the dams they have built in an half-century.   With very little understanding of dams and their impacts on river, fifty years ago, the United States rushed into a water development program.

China, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, takes seriously of its environmental issues at home.  Many environmental related policies are laid down and formulated to limit various actions which have negative impacts to environment. For instance, logging is widely banned in China.  However, China is a growing giant which craves for natural resources including energy.  Since it doesn’t want to hurt itself, based solely on economic interest, it engages with neighboring nations who are willing to fulfill its need.  Social responsibility of Chinese Government towards citizenries from neighboring countries is very obvious to notice.  Chinese Government is notoriously famous that it will engage in any arbitrary actions towards people in other nations as long as its national interests are served.

China knows well about dams and its negative impact on rivers.  Recently, Chinese government admitted and acknowledged the problems of Three Gorges Dam – the world’s largest hydropower plant in China.  Since, it doesn’t want to hurt itself more, its energy resources for nation’s growth are outsourced.  Many teak forests from Myanmar have been disappeared during the short period of time.  So are jades and rubies. 

With agreement of Myanmar government, a Chinese company whose is backed up by the Chinese government is building the largest hydroelectricity project with seven large Dams in the area where two rivers meet making Irrawaddy to flow downstream.  The electricity from this project is mainly for the use in China.   The size of the project is as big as New York City.  I have no idea how these so-called patriotic and nationalistic Generals make this kind of agreement at the expense of Irrawaddy River.  We owe her so much.  In the end, we just sell her out.  It has invaluable historical and cultural values to Myanmar civilization.  With every patriotic blood cell in my vein, I urge all Myanmar people to join hand in hand to help and protect Irrawaddy from being harmed.  She is the sole reason we exist as Myanmar today.  Save Irrawaddy, please. 

Max
20 July 2011

Reference:

Image Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Sagaing3.jpg 
http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2011/06/02/1226067/727997-escape-irrawaddy.jpg  

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

အာဇာနည္မ်ဳိး ေသ႐ုိးမရွိ။





လႊတ္ေတာ္အေဆာက္အအုံသစ္ထဲက
အစုိးရအသစ္ခ်ပ္ခၽြတ္ရဲ႕
ဦးေႏွာက္အေဟာင္းေတြထဲမွာ
ႏွလုံးသားအတုေတြထဲမွာ
အေယာင္ေဆာင္အျပဳံးေတြထဲမွာ
ႏုိင္ငံ့ေက်းဇူးရွင္ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ရဲ႕ ပုံလႊာဟာ ေမွးမိွန္ေပ်ာက္ကြယ္ေနေပမဲ့ . . .

ငါရဲ႕ ရင္ထဲမွာ ငါရဲ႕ အေသြးထဲမွာ ငါရဲ႕ ႏွလုံးသားထဲမွာ
ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေသြးနဲ႔ရင္းခဲ့တဲ့ လြတ္လပ္ျခင္းဟာ
တစ္သက္တာစီးေမ်ာရွင္သန္ေနသေရြ႕
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ လြတ္လပ္ေရးဗိသုကာ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းနဲ႔ သူ႔ေက်းဇူးကုိ
ငါဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မေမ့ဘူးလုိ႔ သစၥာျပဳတယ္။

၁၉၄၇ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇူလုိင္လ ၁၉ ရက္ေန႔မွာ က်ဆုံးခဲ့ၾကတဲ့
ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းနဲ႔တကြ အာဇာနည္၉ဦးနဲ႔အတူ
ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္အတြက္ လြတ္လပ္ျခင္းအတြက္ အသက္ေပးသြားၾကတဲ့
ေခတ္အဆက္ဆက္က အညၾတ အာဇာနည္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာကုိ
ငါ ဒီေနရာကေန ဦးညႊတ္အေလးျပဳတယ္။

အာဇာနည္ေတြအားလုံး ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔ေတြရဲ႕ ရင္ဘတ္ေတြထဲမွာ ထာ၀စဥ္ရွင္သန္ေနၾကမွာပါ။

ေမာင္ပုကီ | ၁၉ရက္ ဇူလုိင္လ ၂၀၁၁ ခု။

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Forgotten


The Forgotten

As far as I remember, Van Gogh was not the one who introduced to one of his world renowned paintings called, “Potatoes Eaters”.  It was Htoo Ein Thin, a late famous singer from Burma (Myanmar).  A song of his was dedicated to Van Gogh.  A line of lyrics described about facial expression of Van Gogh’s Potatoes Eaters somewhere in the song.  I was in my teen hood when I first noticed the phrase, “The Potatoes Eaters”.  I wondered what’s wrong with their facial expressions and how they looked like? 
    


If one takes a closer look on the painting for a while, he/she would agree with me that every faces (except the lady who is sitting opposite to viewers) in this painting are disproportionately drawn up making their faces unsightly.  It seems the adept painter wishes to convey uncomfortable and distressing moment to its viewer when looking at his masterpiece. It indeed mirrors the hard truth of ugly moments and unbalanced life of poor people in a society which usually average people fail to notice.  Without a doubt, I feel depressed and morose by seeing faces of the Potatoes Eaters.  I felt in a way this painting is saturated with feelings of bitterness and ugliness.   

The people in the painting are eating only potatoes.  Why not bread and butter?  Why not rice and some red meat?  Have you ever eaten potatoes only as a meal?  If we were to eat only potatoes as meals in our daily life, I’m sure our facial expressions will be the same way Van Gogh’s illustrated faces in this painting.

Destitute people in a society make scarcity and paucity their friends forever.  Except very few, these impoverished people are forced to lead a struggling and detrimental hardship life by circumstances and socio-eco conditions they are in.     Survival is the only priority in their daily life.  Nothing else.  Whatever they can earn usually goes for daily consumption of low-priced food. Potatoes!!! 

A small dining room with a very dim light from an old oil lamp in the painting reflects the way poor people stay.  It vividly highlights the space – freedom & liberty.  Since survival scores “A” in the life of poor, a place to stay becomes “B”.  Not a priority.  As long as they have a shelter, they will be pleased to stay in for a rainy night and a sunny day.   With no saving and no time to think of other priorities such as education to improve their life, theirs vicious cycle continues.  For countless many unfortunates, generation to generation. 

Van Gogh is trying to describe the life of urban-poor in 1800s in Europe.  My thoughts go beyond boundaries of cities, urbanized communities and normal circumstances.  It forces me to think of survivors of manmade and natural disasters around the world.  How are they copying their daily uncomfortable moments? Are their faces are disproportionately drawn up by situations they are in.  How is their tomorrow going to be?  Will there be any tomorrow for them? How about those refugees in the camps along the nations’ borders or in between states? Series of questions come to me as my train-thoughts moves on. 



These destitute families are usually forgotten in our society.  We don’t usually think of how they live and what they have for meals.  With candor, Van Gogh’s Potatoes Eaters remind me of my unfinished little works in my capacity for those forgotten people in life.  I must not forget them.

Max
11 July 2011 

Images Sources:
[Children from an isolated Irrawaddy Delta village, which is accessible only by boat, waiting on Friday to receive donated food.]

 

Friday, July 8, 2011

What I see and feel about “The Scream”

Despite I’ve seen it several times in the past, I didn’t know who painted “The Scream” for a very long period of time.  Nonetheless every time I see it, I hear a very eerie and peculiar sound of screaming.  And it sounds loudly in my heart too.  I felt as if he is screaming from top of his lungs.  I can see the pain of a painter through his masterpiece.  It is so dry that I can also feel his loneliness.  Suffering is all around him.  The heat from the painting is so intense and it mirrors in the hearts of all viewers.  No wonder everyone who sees it also feels the pain and hears loud and depressing scream. 

Have you ever screamed? If your answer is yes, just think of the reason why you screamed.  Was it because of physical pain?  Or emotionally hurt? Or out of fear?  We scream because we are severely hurt either physically or emotionally.  In other words, suffering makes us shout aloud to let other know that we are in pain. 

This painting, “The Scream”, makes me think of some key chains I’ve seen in one of the magazines some decades ago.  I’m not sure they still exist these days.  They were made from heads of small animals like squirrels, tiny monkeys, etc.  The strange thing was their facial expressions.   They all were screaming as if they were in deep pain before they died.  After I realized the way they were made, I was thrilled and felt disgusted of those people who made these types of key chains.  These small animals were put in very small cages with lids which has a tiny hole.  Only their heads were out from these tiny holes of lids.  Then they were suddenly pricked with pin.  They screamed out of pain.  While they screamed, they were beheaded to capture their frightful facial expressions.  It’s so cruel.  What a unspeakable thing of human act.  I don’t know what kind of people buys these types of key chains.  The whole process is very inhumane and gruesome.  Thus, screaming usually comes out of pain or fear.
  
To me at least, “The Scream” represents suffering.  It vividly illustrates the suffering of being a human.  That’s the very essence Buddha said 2,500 years ago.  Life, in its true color, is full of suffering.  We all cannot see its true color because of greed, hatred and delusions we have in our mind always.  They trick our eyes to see life’s true form.  Only those who with full of consciousness can distinguish what is real from illusion.  I believe Edvard Munch who was one of the great painters of 19th Century attained some form of mindfulness by paintings repeatedly with a very concentrated mind and he was able to see life’s true form somehow.  Most of his paintings indicate suffering of human being in one form or another.  He sees human suffering in everywhere.  He made sure he captured those sufferings in almost all his paintings.  One of his poems also highlighted his phenomenon on impermanence of life too.   

It says:
“From my rotting body,
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity.”
~ Edvard Munch ~

Every time I see “The Scream”, I hear a very eerie and peculiar sound of screaming. It reminds me of the true color of life... the suffering.

Max
5 July 2011