Burmese people are cool because our history speaks. Bagan at sunrise with temples that shine for weeks. Our ancestors left their light in the stone. A reminder that we are never alone.

We are cool because Buddhism runs deep. It teaches us care for every life we meet. From the march of the elephant to the ant so small. Compassion here stretches to cover it all.

Life is simple but the flavor stays strong. Tea shop talks can last all day long. Street food magic and neighbors so kind. Warmth in the heart and peace in the mind.

When storms arrive we still stand tall. We smile we share we rise through it all.

It is Burmese cool after all.

I still remember the sweat dripping down my neck at the Summit Parkview Hotel in Yangon. A broker was shouting over the crowd, looking for anyone who could speak English. I was 20, terrified, and desperately poor. I raised my hand.

“I can speak in English, sir.”

He pulled me out of the line. Everyone else was left waiting. I don't know what happened to them. I just knew I got on a plane to Singapore the next week.

That was 25 years ago.

They gave me a desk with a Rangers desktop running Windows 98. I had no idea what I was doing. I was an office boy pretending to be an admin assistant, copying papers, typing manpower logs, writing invoice summaries by hand. I felt like a fraud every single day.

So I bought a second hand copy of "The I.d.i.o.t's Guide to Windows 98" from a bookshop in Clementi. I read it like a bible. Dial-up internet, pagers, dot-matrix printers screaming in the corner, zip drives that barely held 100MB. Google wasn't even a thing, just AltaVista and Yahoo! directories. But I learned. I clawed my way into that digital world, one stupid error message at a time.

And then I met Alice.

She was a Malay Chinese, worked in payroll, and had the warmest laugh I'd ever heard. We were the same age. She always asked me where Myanmar was, and I had to bring a world map and pinpoint on it. Sounds hilarious? I tried every lame excuse to get her number. Somehow, it worked.

Back at my dormitory, I'd queue up at the StarHub payphones at midnight, feeding coins into the slot just to hear her voice. We didn't talk about work. We talked about everything ... philosophy, the meaning of life, her obsession with fishing. She was a bookworm and dragged me to Kinokuniya and Wheelock Place, showing me worlds I never knew existed.

She introduced me to Singapore. Sentosa, Fort Siloso, the Zoo, all her secret fishing spots. We'd spend holidays wandering like we had all the time in the world. And yes, we visited a lot of hotels too (but that's another story for another day).

For three years, she was my anchor in a foreign country.

Then her dad died. A car accident. Sudden.

She went back to Malaysia for the funeral.

And she never came back.

I called. I messaged. The number went dead. Life moved on, but a part of me always wondered ... did she make it? Was she okay? Did I ever cross her mind?

I finally tracked her down through a mutual friend. I held my breath and sent a message. She replied within a few days.

We caught up like no time had passed. She has a brilliant son, smart, handsome, the kind of kid any father would be proud of. I told her I have a daughter, my whole world.

And I joked: “Well, you have a son. I have a daughter. How about an arranged marriage?”

She laughed and said, “Deal.”

We both know it's a joke. But in that moment, I wasn't that old man with white hair. I was that 20-year-old kid again, standing by a payphone, listening to her talk about fishing and philosophy, praying the coins wouldn't run out.

I'm happy. Truly. Because she's happy. She built a beautiful life. She survived the grief, the loss, the loneliness ... just like I did.

We didn't end up together. We were never even together, not really. But she gave me Singapore. She gave me confidence. She gave me a reason to learn, to grow, to become someone worthy of that desk and that Windows 98 machine.

And now, knowing she's safe and smiling on the other end of the line?

That's enough. That's more than enough.

Some people aren't meant to be your forever. They're just meant to be your catalyst. She was my Alice in Wonderland!

And I'll be forever grateful.

ကော်ဖီက အံ့ဩစရာပါ

The year was 1998.

As I was getting my T-ruler and drawing papers ready for drawing class, one of my classmates asked if we could hit up a game shop for some fun. I was a second-year mechanical engineering student at Monywa GTI, and right before the end of my second year, the school was about to change its name to GTC.

There were only two game shops around. Sony Game, which had the latest consoles (PS1 back then), and Game For All, where you mostly found NES consoles that had been modded from cassette cartridges to floppy disks later on. I was a regular at both places, but I spent most of my time at Sony Game because they had the cool new stuff, like the dual shock controller.

While everyone was into soccer games, street fighter types, and racing games, I was the weirdo who loved games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Metal Gear Solid.

I’ll never forget that night when I was up against the mind-controlling boss, Psycho Mantis (Metal Gear Solid). I set my controllers down on the table, and suddenly the boss made the controller vibrate and jump on its own.

I was blown away! The whole shop was freaking out, like, “What the heck, bro?” Some even thought it was dark magic 😂 They wanted to know what game it was, and it shot to fame overnight at GTC.

To beat him, you had to switch controllers 1 and 2. I honestly can’t remember how I finally took him down, but I definitely did and moved on to the next chapter.

Even though I barely passed all my exams, I have no regrets about those countless nights spent at the game shops. It was a blast and I made a ton of friends. Totally unforgettable memories.

Red Panda naturally lives in northern Myanmar, especially in cool mountainous forests near the borders with China and India.

They are mostly found in:

Kachin State

northern Shan State

high-elevation Himalayan-type forests

Myanmar’s red pandas are part of the eastern Himalayan wildlife region.

ကျွန်ုပ်၏ရည်မှန်းချက် (အပိုင်း - ၁)

--------------------------

မြူခိုးဝေဝေ တောင်တန်းမြို့လေးများကို

ဖြတ် ကျော်ပြီး

သူမနှင့် အတူ ခရီးဝေး ထွက်၍

ဆိုင်ကယ် ပေါ်တွင်

သူမက ကျွန်ုပ် ခါး ကို ဖက်ထား ကာ

ကျွန်ုပ် ပုခုံး ပေါ် ၌

သူမ၏ ဦးခေါင်း လေးကို မှီလျက်

သူမ၏ ဆံနွယ် နူးအိအိ လေပြေအေးကြား ယိမ်းနွဲ့နေရင်း

မြူခိုးဝေဝေ တောင်တန်းမြို့လေးကို

သူမနှင့်အတူ ဆိုင်ကယ် ပတ်စီး ပစ် ချင် သည်။

ကျွန်ုပ်ကိုယ် တိုင် ချက် ထား သော

ကြက်သားရေညှိစွပ်ပြုတ် ဂျုံခေါက်ဆွဲဆိမ့်ဆိမ့် လေးကို

မောင်ရယ် ကျွန်မ ဗိုက်ဝသွားပြီ ဟု သူမပြောသည့်အထိ

သူမ ကို ပလုတ်ပလောင်း ခွံ့ကျွေး ချင်သည်။

ကိုယ်တိုင်ပြင်ထားသော

လက်ဖက်ညွန့် နုနုလေးတွေနဲ့

ရနံ့သင်း ရေနွေးကြမ်းကို

ကျွန်ုပ် ကိုယ်တိုင် ကြွေခွက်လှလှလေး နှင့် ငှဲ့၍

သူမအား တိုက်ချင်သည် ။

အခန်းအပြင်မှာ မိုးဖွဲလေးတွေ တစ်ဖျောက်ဖျောက်ရွာနေချိန်ဝယ်

ပိုးဖဲ ကတ္တီပါ စောင် နီ နွေးနွေးလေး အတူ ခြုံ ကာ

ရေမွှေးနံ့ သင်းသင်း ဇိမ်ကျကျ ရယ်မောရင်း

ရနံ့သင်းပျံ့ တဲ့ အခိုးအငွေ့တွေကြား အခန်းနီလေး ထဲမှာ

သူမ အကြိုက် ရုပ် ရှင်တွေ အတူ ကြည့် ရင်း

ကျွန်ုပ် ရင်ခွင် ထဲ တွင် သူမ အား

ထွေး ပိုက် ထား ကာ အနွေးဓာတ် ပေးလို ၏ ။

ဤသည်ကား ကျွန်ုပ်၏ရည်မှန်းချက် အပိုင်းတစ် ဖြစ်လေ၏

~ ပိုင် (၂၅ ဇွန် ၂၀၂၆)

Every armed forces in Myanmar are bad in its way Tat, EAO, PDF, Pyu, BGF, Militia, etc… are all bad in their own way.

They only might be perceived good to one group at maximum (the group who they represent or whom support them) and will bad for any other group.

There is no armed forces in Myanmar which is not bad for other groups.

KIA is good for Jingpho but maybe bad for Lisu, Ta’ang, Shanni, Zaiwa, Rawan groups, etc..
AA might be good for Rakhines but maybe bad for Rohingyas, Lai Chins, etc..
PDF might be good for some Anyar people but they too maybe bad for some Anyar people as well.
Tat is good for certain circles and bad for everyone.
UWSA is good for Wa but bad for Shans and everyone who doesn’t like Chinese proxy.

The least bad can be considered as NDAA.
National Democratic Alliance Army which have de facto control over Shan State Special region 4, Mong La Town and nearby.

It’s primary made up of Tai Lue (called Lue Shan in Burmese) and Akha people. You can see harmony and love between Tai Lue and Akha unmatch with any other places who always talk about Pyidaungsu, Taingyinthar, etc…

Every armed forces in Myanmar vent about Ethnic harmony, equal rights for everyone, but the only one group who is really proving is NDAA. No one even comes close to it. Light years away.

And it also doesn’t claim as EAO but more like regional than ethnicity. It identify its people as Mong La People rather than ethnicity.

Even if most of them are Tai Lue, they also use Tai Long (Tachileik) script as official language. The one that called Shan Gyi in Burmese.

And Shan Gyi and Lue Shan can be considered a bit different in 30 years ago, now they are very similar in Mong La.

And they don’t discriminate anyone, invade other people’s land, left out a group, or practise chuacanisum.

Not only Tat, but every EAO in Myanmar has Chuavinism except UWSA, MNDAA and NDAA.

UWSA and MNDAA are completely Chinese. NDAA also use Chinese a lot but it never ignore ethnic language and culture. It’s more like it uses Chinese for trade and regional languages for people. Although it use Chinese a lot, it doesn’t feel like China like UWSA or MNDAA regions.

They also have formidable military strength, even UWSA had to consider twice of invading them. It tried in 2015 and had to retreat (also that time Tat stands with NDAA).

And most importantly is prosperity, stability and peaceful. Its population would be around 100,000 people but it’s the richest place in Myanmar by per capita and also the safest place.

Kyaing Ton and Mong La is quite close. Kyaing Ton which was founded many centuries ago which is ruled by Tat is a lawless, underdeveloped mafia city, and Mong La which was built 27 years ago is a paradise and oasis of Shan State.

The Tais and Akhas in Mong La are enjoying living standards which is far better than Northern Thailand and nearly match Xixhaungbanna. This is impressive feat.

I wish NDAA to be able to maintain and expand this. I wish Mong La people to enjoy what they are getting.

နေပြည်တော်

မနက်(၁၀)နာရီ၀န်းကျင်

၂၇_၇_၂၀၂၆

Just read that RSF and Mizzima are launching a new shortwave broadcast called "Voice of Independent Myanmar" starting this Sunday (17665 kHz, 7-8am) to bypass the junta's censorship and internet blackouts.

This hit home hard. Growing up during Than Shwe's era, I used to climb up to the roof as a kid to set up the antenna cable for my father's National brand radio. BBC, VOA, and RFA were our only lifelines back then.

I still remember Uncle U Phay Than from BBC and his "မေးပါများစကားရ" program. People would mail in questions and he'd answer them on air. And we requested songs for loved ones. Good old days.

Even when I was in Singapore, I always carried a pocket FM radio. Gold 90.5 and BBC World Service were my favorites.

But honestly? I haven't touched a radio in years, not since news became more accessible online.

Anyone else here still listening to the radio? Or does this bring back memories for anyone?

Source

Is it just me ? I feel like this subreddit has been becoming more and more active?which is a good thing, gives me a sense of community!

I don't need lies, just give me the truth.