Prologue to Burmese Sunrise

Who controls the past controls the future:
Who controls the present controls the past
(Nineteen Eighty-Four)

In the modern age of the internet and the mass movement of people, can a country truly isolate itself from the forward momentum of the global zeitgeist? No. That is why Burma is rising. After 50 years living in the shadows of a brutal and oppressive military dictatorship that controls every facet of life (from the way you think to who your friends are), the people, led by Burma’s most revered and respected citizens; the monks, are beginning to find their voice.

The United States pretends to lead the international fervour to condemn the military autocracy; yet China and India (both regional powers) remain conspicuous by their silence; instead treating the whole thing as a Burmese affair and not something for the international community to meddle in.

The whole thing stinks to high-heaven. America pretends to champion democracy when it has toppled and undermined democratically elected governments all over the world. I’ll give an example: Venezuela. The people chose Chavez to lead them. He began a process of empowering the down-trodden to the chagrin of the elite and the Americans (grown corpulent with petrodollars). So what did they do? What they do best when somebody refuses to play ball – they tried to get rid of him! (but mercifully failed because the proletariat masses rose in revolt - people power in action)

So am I surprised when the United States cries democracy in Burma? Well actually No. And this is why:

India is the beneficiary of cheap natural gas from Burma to fuel its burgeoning economy. So it prefers to remain dignified and silent to Burma's plight – lest a new government decides to switch off the gas supply. China has been given huge contracts, in affect carte blanche to mine and exploit the countries natural resources. An example of the Generals acting on behalf of the nation’s 50 million citizens who incidently won’t see a penny of it. Burmese leaders have in effect mortgaged the country to another country. The Americans may receive some of these lucrative contracts if the elite are toppled and a democracy installed. They’d love to go in with tanks and guns to ‘democrucify’ but can’t on account of China’s influence.

Can you smell something? I can. I can smell the stink of human greed, treachery, self-interest, selfishness and out-right hypocrisy.

Humans are, in light of my considerable expertise on the matter (!), cowardly, treacherous, selfish, capricious and dishonest morons and I’m embarrassed to be one of them! Is there anyway, I wonder aloud, I can make void my status as a ‘national’ of the human stain?

The only good humans are the little one’s; the children. For they have not yet caught the cancer of adulthood! Am I being harsh? Fucking right I am. Why do people make life so unduly complicated anyway? The politics of relationships, the petty bickering of families, the back-stabbing and lies of politicians, the lie of religion, the boringness of social customs, the pretense of charity, the psychopathic greed of corporations.

Wouldn’t it be just wonderful if you could just light out and fade away to some place far from boring people and live like a hermit with nothing to bother you; in a little hut somewhere with a field of spuds and carrots and spend the nights whistling love poems to the stars! Mmm...Away from the scheming and dunce opinions of stupid ignoramuses!

Thank you for reading my rant.

By: A stinky, selfish, human being. But not boring!

Read ‘Burmese Days’
Read Orwell

Coming soon...Burmese Sunrise

The London Zoo: Canary Wharf to Hackney

You begin in London’s Docklands and end up in Hackney. This is a journey that takes you through the rich savannah of London’s world famous wildlife reserve: ‘Moronic Park’ From the high rise of Canary Wharf in the Dockland’s where the wild-life is genial, tame and generally harmless to the seething urban jungle of Hackney where the forces of Darwinism seem to have gone pear shaped and survival is of the dumbest variety only.

Have you ever seen London’s Docklands at night? Towering glass infernos hanging like crusty stalagmites; glistening in the drizzly twilight like a zillion diamonds baked into rectangular slabs of shiny metal. Bright squares of light surround you floating in nothingness. It’s a strange sight - surreal. Like something out of the set of a Fritz Lang movie. It reminded me of the video to Queen’s classic “Radio Ga-Ga” where Freddy, Brian, John and Roger weave through the ‘scrapers of a futuristic metropolis in their flying machine: “I sit alone. And watch your lights. My only friend. Through teenage nights…”

You feel like you’re in the video as you sit in the carriage of the 'Docklands Light Railway' (DLR)– a modern marvel that Brunel would have been proud of. The DLR is built on great stilts that raise the track 40ft above street level as it snakes its way between the glass precipices that loom over it. When you peer through the window you can’t fail but marvel at the floating squares of light, just hanging there as if motionless in space (lights from the buzzing industry of offices). The stations and places you pass have names that allude to a rich history and a sense of humour: Mudchute, Pudding Mill Lane, Galleons Reach, West India Quay and Coriander Avenue. On your way to work the carriage swarms with city slicker types; decked in finely cut suits, haute couture shirts, gourmet ties, and the obligatory spiky ‘just got out of bed’ muff of hair. And all this dressed in a rich sauce of smug ostentatiousness.

The docklands is everything the rest of London is not: squeaky clean, planned, well designed, restrained, polite, polished, German almost, with a distinctive whiff of wealth and a bloated pretentiousness that manifests itself as a scab of self-importance; like a spoilt super-model. You see it in the passengers in the DLR. All modest behind their dandy shoes, quiet, minding their own business, sullen expressions as if they’re the unluckiest bastards on earth!

It lacks something though. You get to understand what when you make the second leg of the journey home: Bank station (in the City of London) to Hackney on the 149 bus. When you get on the 149 your still in the City so it’s full of respectable types: people of culture and learning (snobbish git I am!). The bus is Zen-calm, relaxed, a gentle patina of chit-chatter like soothing raindrops murmurs in the background. But as soon as the bus hits Shoreditch and the Kingsland Road (that defines the boundary between The City and Hackney) it’s almost like a scene out of ’28 days later’ – invasion of the zombie flesh eating yokels. I’m not sure what it is about Hackney; perhaps the air in Hackney is somehow different or perhaps it’s the water but the fact of the matter is before you can say ‘who nicked my f***ing wallet?’ the decibel level suddenly starts to rise and before you know it, you’re crossed an invisible threshold because even though you’re wearing your German made headphones (that promised to keep out all sounds bar those from your ipod), you can still make out some of the foul mouth expletives amongst the din. ‘Fuckin this’ and “fucking dat’ and ‘dirty cunt this’. The change in decibel level occurs in tandem with a change in vernacular parlance. Like a double comedy act: ‘yaa maan innit’ – ‘dats buff’ – ‘yo chief’ – ‘lemme see dat man wicked’ etc. I’m not going to trawl through the vocab less it give me a bleedin ed’ache man but you get my gist innit? The change in tongue and switch to mashup English also coincides with a change in passenger profile.

Gone is the city type, who seems to have fled and got off at Liverpool Street Station to continue the journey into the salubrious leafy suburbs. The void that is left by this sudden departure is gradually filled, as we move into deepest darkest Hackney, by another type of passenger. Preliminary indications are that the passenger aforementioned are of a type that can be regarded as human; but barely so: Homo Hackneosyphillis – features of note are a general look of unhealthiness, spaced-out eyes that wobble at you thorough deeply recessed orbits, a face like Edvard Munch’s painting 'The Scream' (that depicts a state of insanity), and clothing bought from the condemned section of the Sunday flea market.

Now, I have nothing against markets. In-fact I love to wander amongst them on a Sunday morning, but there are certain things I would never buy from them. Namely, pills claiming to be Viagra, blood sugar-level testers for my mother, Chinese porn DVDs called ‘King Kong – bigger then part IV’ (featuring a hairy gorilla, strange grunting sounds and lots of naked fondling up trees and necrophilia – sexual attraction to corpses) and of course clothes. Why? Because I don’t want to look like a walking trash bin and besides it’s so obvious anyway when you’re dressed as the rag man.

Looking at the stunted and moth eaten population of Hackney you’d think everybody was on a ration diet of bread and marge from the many ‘Caffs’ that litter the Dalston High Road like smallpox. It’s not just the shriveled faces though; the rots even got into the cranium. Extract of conversation between father and son sitting opposite:
‘Wer we goin dad?’
‘To dat no good slag bitch mother of yours, so shut the f**k up’
Mm, another kid that’s gonna grow up to be a well balanced nipper

Then there’s a little altercation in the back between a black women and a black kid over the lack of respect. The kid seems to be suffering from some sort of spinal affliction as he’s walking with a lilt and rubberized ‘limb syndrome’ – The Hackney Walk
“Yo stop barlin man. Tut!” he says to her
“You got no respect. The lot of you! I’m not even gonna bother getting down to your level” she barks back.
The youngster continues giving it his best no doubt to save face with his friends.
Then there’s the bunch of school girls in the back pointing and sniggering at people on the street:
“Tut! look at that man! Check out those freaky trousers!”
“What about him, check out his hair? Check out the old man with the zimmer frame and the glasses!” They start banging on the window scaring the people on the street and no doubt giving themselves a bad reputation.

As the bus moves down Stoke Newington High Street you’re now in yet another world: The Ottoman Empire Part deux. The Ottoman Empire, originally dismantled after the 1st world war, now seems to have sprung up on my very doorstep. Its invasion of the 24 hour Kurdish Convenience Store (now rapidly becoming something of a cliché) with its rudely lit façade and supply of Turkish cheeses, sausages and fresh olives (yummy) and the abundant Turkish Restaurants too. Now, I love these restaurants, the food is fantastic and fresh and the service friendly and prices not too bad either but all the menus are identical; in all the restaurants! But the stiff competition (there’s a new restaurant opening every time I walk down the High Street) has driven down prices and driven up quality, which is much more then what can be said about the card-board cut outs of ‘Bangla Town’s’ identikit restaurants with their touts luring in victims with false promises of ‘great food’ – the operative term here being food!

Time to get off now. I don’t know but it sure makes my journey much more interesting then it would otherwise be if we had nothing but fish and chip and pie and mash shops. I think I’ll grab some food on the way home tonight. Yeah, feel like some fish and chips innit!
Bon appetite!

Souk of furtive eyes, plums and breasts

Upon the breath of a scowling desert zephyr beset with scarlet twists, the ruddy sunlight filters through your Sun Factor-4 shades. Your eyes flutter furtively like a mad compass slobbering on the dusty verdant plums and melons adorning the Souk. But most pleasure is gathered when the eyes carve a gaze, quite innocently, upon the delicacies of women. It could be anything that may drive you to licentious heights and dirty thoughts; the mere shape of a breast visible through the taut fabric that wraps it from the eyes of capriciousness; wraps it tight like cling-film, the embroidered cloth stretched over it; giving form to the areolic perkness. But what really turns you feverish and nourishes your giddy heart are the little saucy enticements; the dirty details : The soft electric fingers; silvery nailed and delicate, feeling through the softly ripening plums. The impish henna pattern that snakes its way coyly up the back of a naked ankle disappearing behind the iron curtain of a burqah. Hah! Innocent or coquettish? A gentle bite of pouting bottom-lip held there just long enough to tangle thoughts – mere reflection or something less innocent? The black strap of a brassiere; raised outline visible from behind sinister on a sea of pink flesh; pink and buoyant with the desires of undressing. The slit; the slit of eyes furnished in kohl; dark and sensuous where gazes are lost and the deepest well of mystery known to man.

Such deviltry to ravish the imagination! Such spunk! Flashes of skin. Brief tumults of delirium attracting like flies - like prickly pear. Velcro to your heart.

Above Ali’s coffee shop on the corner of Bayt al Ghurair lies the chanteuse; she - redolent in flowing brocade under a phosphorous sky. False eye lashes sweeping vast curves under the stars and then plucked in the mirror under a slab of red light drowned out by the lullabies of the sugary street. She raises her leg; a glimpse of stocking where it is fastened above the knee, and a stretch of forbidden flesh. Your Heart inebriated. A little bird dances inside your stomach.

Her gaze breaks like the sun through leaves. Like a gilded ray on a sun-beam, she smiles. You catch a rosy blushing and your desires latch on to her lips. What was that? Like a burst of lightning glowing for a brief moment, the flash illuminating a vast expanse in your heart; barren, arid, and then you cower away; shrink into the shadowy void. The heart drunk with joy with a sorrow that never fails to trail behind it; like the winds of the desert of the Empty Quarter.

Your heart pulsates like a milky star and then ceases like the halos of a candle hemmed in by the darkness. What a beautiful world it is! What joy! What pleasures! Sonorous notes that strum the tendons laid bare. And such blessed creatures that walk it! - the smashing of shattered hearts trailing behind in their wake as they swish across the surface in flowing garbs and perfumed air; like a tumultuous Coming. I await thee storm of the femme lycanthropes.

You walk through this deluge bombarded with conflicting signals and confused motivations. It's all a game played out in the Souk of furtive eyes, plums and breasts. These gulleys of saucery; gyrating with human flesh. Shrieks of those pleasured fill the musky air; mingling with the thoughts of old humanity laid bare.

Anatomy of a writer and other nonsense

I find it supremely odd. Well I find many things supremely odd, but I find it particularly odd when I sit down in my local Wagamama style noodle bar called ‘Itto’, which I have not blessed with a visit for many years hence, to find that the same waitress, from many years past, is serving me. She plonks the steaming bowl of Ramen noodles in my field of vision, the threads of steam climbing their way up into my nostrils, brightening my eyes and imparting a certain lustre to my cheeks. I compare this person here and now with the historical fragments in my memory and see no difference. I watch her as she dribbles swiftly between the tables like an Olympian, the dirty plates dangling on her arm like a circus act whilst she wipes the tops in busybody fashion.

Her clothes don’t seem to have changed either from what I remember. The same trousers that showcase her hips and fine form, her hair worn in a little bobbin and her Japanese style Kino top looking imperial and very appetizing. I notice that time has hardly settled upon her face. Merely having scraped her for her eyes look tired and worn. My mind wanders and then gives spark to an emotion that grows inside. Faint at first but growing till it can no longer mask itself: Pity. I feel pity for her. The same monotonous drudgery for the past 10 years! In the same restaurant! How can anybody do that? Why would anybody want to do that? – does she not wish for something altogether different?

What she needs is a mysterious stranger to saunter in and whisk her off on some adventure somewhere – You know, I could be that stranger. Sweep her off her feet, put blind-folds on her eyes, stick cotton plugs in her ears, stick a dummy in her mouth, a plane ticket in her pocket, and then 12 hours later – voila! : ‘Madame Waitress welcome to Bhutan!’ - But something tells me that she wouldn’t respond very well to such chauvinistic chivalry. Also we must not animate others with our own prejudices.

But then as she serves me, filling the basket with more fresh bread and all with a genuine smile and the attention befitting of a king or lord of the manor, I realize that my plan to smuggle her out is doomed to failure from the outset because she is happy and content with her lot. And there lies a revelation: You see, having a really monotonous job; as a waitress, or a book-keeper - all these employments, these acts of selling your time to the highest bidder, have one redeeming feature in common. And that is the fact that it is the drudgery inherent within such work that allows you to really saviour that day off work! If it wasn’t for the drudgery you wouldn’t enjoy the day off! How’s that for a catch-22?

There are 2 types of days off work (excluding weekends):

Type 1: This is the unexpected day off work. You wake up in the morning fully expecting to get out of bed, face the dreary commute in, followed by the sullen sulky walk as you drag your feet into the office. But as chance has it you can’t because you’ve just remembered about a doctor’s appointment, or you don’t feel like going in today and have phoned in sick, or whatever. The fact is you have a whole day that’s landed on your lap and it’s all yours for keeps! There’s a nice feeling associated with this. A feeling of having shaken off your shackles. In short a feeling of freedom.

Type 2: This is the expected day off work. It didn’t suddenly land on your lap. You knew it was coming because you filled in an ‘employee absence’ form. It’s still a nice feeling to have though.

So the point is that that feeling you get when you take a day off work will only be yours if you are in full time employment. What is a day-off work for the person who never works because he has other financial means to sustain him?
What is another country to the global traveler?
What is a nice restaurant meal to a gastro-snob?
What is a movie to a movie critic?
If your dreams came true, what then would you dream of?

That is why I always stumble out of bed early and, depending on mood and weather, will either sit at my desk or go to my local coffee shop (where a comfortable sofa, quietness and lovely staff always greet me) and write. Yes write. As in pen and paper. It is my job to write. In-fact I consider it my main job. Yes I do work, but only on a freelance basis which I must admit suits me rather well. Just as most people will not take a day off work on a whim, so in the same way I will not take a day off writing on a whim. It is work pure and simple. I can see many people chuckling at this, scratching their chins, trying to see this writing as work, but not convinced it is ‘work’ per se. But what is ‘work’ then? Well here’s a litmus test: You know you are engaged in something called ‘work’ when if you take a day off it you get a nice feeling in your tummy. Occasionally I too will take a day off writing and I too get a nice feeling in my tummy. So it’s work!

Writing can be a pleasurable thing, oh yes - when it is going smoothly that is. Then you feel as if your gliding above the chimney tops on wings made of magical stuff called inspiration and picking off ideas from the unlikeliest of trees; inspiration is gotten using the currency of experience and sometimes from dredging and canabalising other people’s ideas!

Then there’s times when you struggle to even string a decent sentence together. You find yourself holed up in some metaphorical fetid cellar; rank and unwholesome and devoid of any food for thought. Then writing can be humbling and bumbling, unexciting and stale, and most of all a struggle. Like walking up-hill on a dune with your feet sinking; taking timid feeble steps that grind to a complete halt and then you look around spying the vistas and wonder whether you’re doing the right thing. And that’s another topic ripe for discussion: the right thing. And the worst part is you don’t even know where you’re headed. The End. You never know when it will come. If it will come. All you know is that you’ve gotta keep going because it is what you do, what you enjoy more than anything else in the whole wide world. And that you know for a fact.

That is my lot: Ickety-bickety scurrying little rats life in the service of Lady Literature. But slowly, innocuously, scribble-scribble, drip-drip, word after word, you keep plodding on through the excrement of the past months produce. The sheer mass of what you have written before pushing you forward into the unknown future. It would be madness to stop now. Sheer madness! Every word here and now, every sentence, every stab on paper heralds a juncture in time, a fork in the road that blazes a path to the future. Perhaps ‘blazes’ is the wrong word here as it sounds heroic. There’s nothing heroic about writing. More like a shuffling-bumbling-stumbling venture. It confounds people. Scrambles their sense of what constitutes a ‘normal’ life and a normal occupation.

It’s a dog’s life I tell you. The smelly socks. The constant ink stains on your fingers. The sleepless nights when your mind fails to switch off and you mumble excerpts in your sleep. The scraping the bottom of the barrel for that smidgen of an original idea. The pernicketyness of the sound of a vowel. The mood swings of a comma. The semi-colons that attack you in your sleep and the empty blank sheets of paper that go on and on and swallow you whole like the Gobi desert. I wouldn’t wish this life upon my worst enemies. It’s a dog’s life don’t you think? But I wouldn’t want to do anything else either. I love it the more for it!

Coming soon...'AD 2657' - (Sci-fi noir fiction)