Monday, April 5, 2010

Say as it is

RECENTLY I read an article named "Angry when people say Burmese are lousy" that was written by a well known writer from Myanmar. The title makes me interest to read and it's nothing wrong with his title. But I don't agree with the reasons he (writer) gave for why Burmese are not worthy to be called like that. Different people may have different idea and I have to respect in what he is thinking regarding to this matter.

Who want to be called lousy in this world? If somebody step forward and say "yes", probably he has been wrong with something and need to be given medical attention especially in psychology. The writer explained based on his personal experience and knowledge from history. In order to simplify this, he explained based on sport what he believe is most popular among his audience. Still OK to read until there.

He listed out a lot of famous athletes from Burma, but not present time, from a few decades ago if it is not for a century. He said, Myanmar was a king of south-east asia that time and it'll not take care any rival from the region. Sound is more than good enough if it is happening in the present days. Plus he insisted that Japanese didn't know how to play football when Myanmar's football is well developed and enjoy at the level of Asia. It is a wow and younger generation will laugh once they are told like that today. Some other area he highlighted are

When Burmese built a Bagan pagoda with highly rated aesthetic factors, US and Europe are struggling to survive from world and trying to construct their own.

When Burmese King Dynasty are inventing a bomb, some factories for coins, dying, etc, Europe is struggling from world war.

When Burmese are enjoying almost 100% educated, Europe hasn't got the same chance among gender viz European women are not getting a chance to educate properly.

When Myanmar are popular in the region if it is not for world, Singapore was not even existing in world map.

What a hilarious thing for today generation? He is pointing out a history and never paid attention to current. The past is, in fact, history and nothing to do with us today. We have to realize our current situation if we really want to improve our country as well as life style of our citizen. Nobody will deny if somebody say Myanmar is one of the poorest country in the world right now. Then some people like the writer still insist our country is good enough by proofing helpless past things.

Some static show/ proof where is our country position. Basically a country is formed by people who live in. So the people are fully responsible for the country's progress or degress. A country's development level is usually measured by GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and we never know the exact figure of our country if it is revealed by government. We cannot rely on funny data that is not accurate. It must be realistic regarding to its economic performance. Here are some data I can consider with my tiny brain to proof we are still under-achievers:-

-I cannot find a single Myanmar University in top 200 Asia's University (not World's University)
-I always see Myanmar continent is positioned below half table in Asean Game.
-I cannot find Yangon in Asean City's weather report
-As a result of sanction, we have to sell our natural resource like timber,gas with cheap price to neighbouring countries
-I can able to read only bad news in oversea paper.
-Recent Nargis show how poverty deep among our fellow citizen.
-people are dying for starvation or lack of medication
-Educated people are leaving country to seek a low paid job (mostly)
-Our expensive degree/certificate become a piece of paper when we are out of mother land
-We need a visa even travelling within asean countries while other our asean counterpart don't need
-We are needed to pay for probably world's best rate of income tax.

My opinions can be wrong, but I pull it out from my personal experience. I am always itchy when my country is expelled from world's community. Of course we want to see our country as a success country with dignity. In real world, we don't even feel we are welcomed to stay and work in oversea. You may want to urge me to go back home and work in some place if I willing to see some improvement within our country. I don't say I am patriot who will give his life for country. But for sure is I will gladly serve my country when it needs me someday. Since I am a civilian now, it's likely my government won't need me now. Anyway as long as I am paying my tax correctly, I would able to feel comfortable as a dutiful citizen.

In the respect of our younger generation, let's say as it is. It is not for shame to tell truth if you are honest to your country. I believe that I'll not change my mind by time. Where we go? What is going to be happen? Everything not sure. Do we able to possess a secure and good life with a full of don't know in mind? I don't think so. Then what we can do for that? My answer would be again "I also don't know". Probably this can be called a life cycle of a lousy community. At least you might want to call me a lousy man. Hey!, be remember there is a burmese saying that "keeping don't know will never make you poor". Are you agree with that? Most likely your answer would be "yes" for now...:D


2 comments:

  1. ဇင္မင္းျငိမ္္း ေရ ဒီ post ကို ဆရာၾကီး ကိုလဲ ျပန္ဖတ္ေစခ်င္တာ။ပီးရင္ အျပန္အလွန္ feed back and comments ေတြကိုဖတ္ခ်င္တာ။ ဘူးတလုံးေဆာင္ အိုေတာင္မဆင္းရဲ တာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အတြက္ဘဲ ထင္တယ္ေနာ္။

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  2. I am not happy with the way I write in this post. In fact I can't reach what I want to express exactly due to my poor English skill. So to me, it's better he(writer) won't see it either accidentally or deliberately. Thanks for ur core support anyway.

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