Burma: The colour of blood is saffron

By Amit Sengupta Great Spanish poet Pablo Neruda, who spent some years in Rangoon as the Chilean consul to Burma when he was just about 23, rediscovered the amazing texture of 'time and space' in this laid-back, slow and friendly country. In between falling in love and writing a painful farewell poem to 'Josie Bliss', from whose obsessive passion for him he reportedly   ran away, Neruda wrote about how life-affirming is this flight of time. So what is wrong if what is being done in an entire day can be done in an hour in more technologically sophisticated societies?

It is the rhythm and fabric of time that is more rich, loaded with nuances, feeling its own sense and substance in the passage of time. The quality of time is more important and sacred then the 'quantity' of time or the product which follows the productivity of work.

Such is perhaps the beauty and patience of traditional societies, like the fisherman who can wait it out near the waters, or the boatman who can swing with the tide which never comes, not even on a full moon nights, like the poet whose verse is unhurried, like Neruda's magical poetry.

That is what comes back as the Buddhist monks in saffron (unlike the xenophones of Hindutva saffron in India) stake their lives, in tens of thousands, against the junta jackboot of the military mafia in Burma. The monks, who could wait and withdraw into the materialism of inner peace and tranquility, enter the streets in the same manner, and walk in long rows of silence, unhurried, like a river and a poem, unafraid of life, unafraid of death, unafraid of time.

That they are facing perhaps one of the most brutal and nasty dictatorships in the world has not deterred them; they kept coming out, with prayers for justice and peace, reworking a post-modern liberation theology in a small obscure country which has been forgotten by world powers. Except that the superpowers and neighbours like China, India and Russia have willfully and shamefully decided to relentlessly back the junta because of reasons other than democracy or humanity.

Think about it. These nations, and the western nations including Britain, which controlled Burma as its administrative territory in the early 20 th century, still use the colonial metaphor. They have ignored all pleas for justice, for democracy, against mass detentions and torture in jails for decades, against the elimination and disappearance of hundreds of students and dissidents, against killings of innocents, against organised State repression. They have allowed a little country and its condemned people to die a living death in abject suffering and imprisonment, in abject poverty.

Why?

This is because they are part of the loot and plunder of the natural resources and gas reserves of this pristine country on the borders of India's northeast. All these countries are using, extracting and eyeing the natural riches of Burma. Hence democracy can be damned, long live the junta.