Myanmar - January/February 1996
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear streams of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward into ever-widening thought and action — Into that heaven of freedom, let my country awake.
Rabindranath Tagore
Tagore's longings for a free India are conjured up by Myanmar's (Burma's) pro-democracy movement as decades of dictatorship by an entrenched military junta persist. The political scene is one compelling reason to visit this country... the oppression, the menace in the air, imposed by die unelected and unloved. But there are many more compelling reasons...
