Tricycle | Awake in the World

Burma is, in its way, a kind of shadow Tibet, Tibet without the glamour or mystique, as devoutly Buddhist a country as the land of 6,000 monasteries to the north. The charms of its pre-modern culture have been preserved from the modern world by a policy of inwardness. Its people have a good nature and gentle strength that instantly convert every visitor to their cause. And for thirty years now, it has been suffering a demeaning and remorseless repression that the rest of the world is either unable or unwilling to combat. A nation is dying in silence there (in some ways, it is dead already, Burma having been renamed “Myanmar” by its oppressors).